Share Your Life

Other than good beer, the other thing I need most in my life is organization. One look at my office desk will tell anyone that I am a hopeless jumble of ideas, plans and good intentions in various states of completion. I used to depend on my wife to tell me exactly when and where I needed to be. She was very reliable but I decided I needed something that would better fit in my pocket and that has a mute button. So I replaced her with an iPhone.
My iPhone reminds me when to take my medicine, when to leave for the next soccer game and reminds me of birthdays and anniversaries as long as I remember to enter them into the thing. A problem that I used to have is that I had a calendar on my home computer and a calendar on my office computer and one on my iPhone that did not “talk” to each other. If I needed one event to appear in all my calendars, I needed to actually remember to enter it into each calendar separately. That presents a problem for people like me who use calendars because they can’t remember stuff.

Now, with the advent of Google Calendar Synch, I can enter my event in either my home, office or iPhone calendar and it will automatically synchronize to all my other computers.
The set-up for this is so easy anyone can install it. Simply go to www.Google.com and sign up for a free Google account. The Google account gives you a free email address along with the whole bunch of other nifty online tools such as a word processor, spreadsheet and dozens of other neat applications. The account also comes with an on-line calendar that will function as your “home base” for calendar synchronization.

The next step is to download Google’s free “Calendar Sync” program onto your home, office and iPhone/Blackberry. Once installed on your office computer, the software will copy all your events in your Outlook calendar and synchronize them with your on-line Google calendar. When you get home, sign into your Google account again and install the Calendar Synch software on your home computer. It will then synchronize the calendar on your home computer with the Google calendar and, subsequently, your office computer.

The last step is to install the same software on your Blackberry or iPhone. Once you do that, anything you enter in your Blackberry/iPhone will automatically enter themselves in all your other calendars in real-time instead of having to manually synch them daily.

You can also share your Google calendar with anyone else such as office personnel and friends or use it to manage your sports team schedule. At my office, each of my technicians have their own Google calendar. They share their calendar with me so that on the off chance I need to know where they have been for the past few days; I can simply pull up my Google calendar to check their schedules.