Righty, we're on to organising tools then, and this one is Google Calendar.
Now I have to say, I'm not going to be doing this Thing, for various reasons. Mainly, I don't really have a need for it in my life.
Work
I have a personal work calendar, as does my boss. We can both access each others calendars when needed, and see what each person is up to - this is useful if my boss is unavailable and people want to check with me whether they could schedule a meeting with her, or when she has a gap in her day. Our calendars allow us to easily book meeting rooms in our firm, and keep track of events and plans.
This is the only calendar I have any need to share the information on with anyone, and this is already possible.
We also don't need to publicise anything to our users: we're here during core service hours, and sometimes beyond, and if either one of us is not at their desk (holidays etc) we put up signs on our monitors, put on out of office emails, and generally make it clear that the other member of staff will deal with enquiries at that time.
Personal
My brother at one point tried to schedule my trip with him around New Zealand using Google Calendar. We quickly gave up, as I was never in a Google account to see his changes, so he'd have to email me on my normal email to tell me to log in to another email account to look at something he could have just told me by email in the first place....if you don't use Google as your email service provider, it's just a hassle rather than a help.
For other personal planning, I use the calendar in my phone, and a paper version, although I've not used that much in the last year. I need to get back into that habit, as when my current phone gets replaced, my last two years of activity will get vaporised - not good if I'm trying to keep track of what talks I've been to, what events I've attended, and use these for my Revalidation submission!
Other reasons
I tend not to want to trust to much of my online life to any one service (for good reason), so I try and keep things reasonably separate. Since I have multiple email accounts, and multiple Gmail/Google accounts (work-related or personal ones), then for this to be useful for me I would have to be consistently using just one single account, and be logged into it at all times. And that's not going to happen. So for now, Google Calendar isn't a tool I feel I need.
Now I have to say, I'm not going to be doing this Thing, for various reasons. Mainly, I don't really have a need for it in my life.
Work
I have a personal work calendar, as does my boss. We can both access each others calendars when needed, and see what each person is up to - this is useful if my boss is unavailable and people want to check with me whether they could schedule a meeting with her, or when she has a gap in her day. Our calendars allow us to easily book meeting rooms in our firm, and keep track of events and plans.
This is the only calendar I have any need to share the information on with anyone, and this is already possible.
We also don't need to publicise anything to our users: we're here during core service hours, and sometimes beyond, and if either one of us is not at their desk (holidays etc) we put up signs on our monitors, put on out of office emails, and generally make it clear that the other member of staff will deal with enquiries at that time.
Personal
My brother at one point tried to schedule my trip with him around New Zealand using Google Calendar. We quickly gave up, as I was never in a Google account to see his changes, so he'd have to email me on my normal email to tell me to log in to another email account to look at something he could have just told me by email in the first place....if you don't use Google as your email service provider, it's just a hassle rather than a help.
For other personal planning, I use the calendar in my phone, and a paper version, although I've not used that much in the last year. I need to get back into that habit, as when my current phone gets replaced, my last two years of activity will get vaporised - not good if I'm trying to keep track of what talks I've been to, what events I've attended, and use these for my Revalidation submission!
Other reasons
I tend not to want to trust to much of my online life to any one service (for good reason), so I try and keep things reasonably separate. Since I have multiple email accounts, and multiple Gmail/Google accounts (work-related or personal ones), then for this to be useful for me I would have to be consistently using just one single account, and be logged into it at all times. And that's not going to happen. So for now, Google Calendar isn't a tool I feel I need.
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