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Google Calendar Saved My Life (at least for finals week and job recruiting)

As fall quarter has officially ended, I always look back in retrospect to see if I have used my time efficiently and well. Most of the time, everything I plan out months in advance in my written planner seems to change once I actually get to the date. Eventually, I figured out that I truly have way too many things to keep track of, and I don't even have enough room in my notebook-sized academic planner. With job applications, presentations, interviews, and the random extra-curricular activities that I am involve with on campus, I figured it was time to make full use of the Google Calendar account sitting with my Gmail account. Not only do I have lists of things to do, but I have list with times attached to them. In addition, many advanced undergrad courses involved utilizing study groups, so this could be a great way to organize and schedule study sessions without having to be on facebook all the time. (As we all know, Facebook isn't for serious get-togethers.)

Now that the job recruiting season is over, I have much to thank to Google Calendar for helping me to organize my life. The calendar even let me send SMS messages to myself to alert me of appointments and interviews 15 minutes in advance. Although I wished that I could color-code events by category or highlight important appointments on Google Calendar (yes, I'm a little
obsessive-compulsive when it comes to my time). Now someone has even developed a Facebook add-on to help us keep track of our facebook friends' birthdays as an iCalendar file.

Anyway, I decided to talk to a few of my friends with varying levels of tech know-how about their uses of Google Calendar (and other shared calendars in general).

The first friend who went through on-campus recruiting with me said Google Calendar was extremely helpful in helping her keep track of resume drop deadlines, presentations and information sessions, pre-interview dinners, interviews, and office visits through one of the most stressful parts of a college senior's life. She checked it daily during the season, but now that it is over (and she has a job), she only checks it once a week. She now uses Google Calendar to schedule some social events. Her calendar is not public, and she rarely uses the "shared" features on Google Calendar. She states convenience and multiple languages as strengths of Google Calendar. For practical purposes, she even couldn't think of anything negative about the service. She too would like to be able to color-code her scheduled events and would use it on mobile if it was free. (Like any college student who is price elastic.)

Then I talked to another friend who has more tech know-how then I ever will. (I actually thank him for many of the applications I use right now.) He actually tried a variety of shared calendar apps before settling down on Google Calendar, Outlook, and Scheduleworld. (Yes, he does have more than one mobile phone.) He thought 30boxes was a little too "Mac-y" while scheduleworld was pretty decent. Due to the different formats and standards used by the shared calendars, he finds it very difficult to sync his multiple computers, mobile phones, and his Xbox 360. Because truly two-way sharing can only be done with Microsoft Exchange (which costs a lot of money), he is always frustrated that he can't upload his schedules on the spot without having to physically input the change into the application. He even spent countless hours during work to figure out how to sync all of his gadgets in a drawing that I have somewhere in my inbox. Currently, he has Outlook to Scheduleworld to Google Calendar in his sync map.

So I thought about this for awhile as I do want to break away from my written academic planner at some point. I decided to peruse through some social networking sites to see if anyone else had any ideas on the subject. Some people thinks that Google is actually stressing them out more because of all the free "productive" tools that were available to them. Someone even made an application that generates an iCalendar compiling all your Facebook friends' birthdays.
Nonetheless, many students still use the old-school academic planners. Personally, I sometimes feel more satisfied when I physically cross out a task in my academic calendar. You really can't emulate that with a calendar application on your mobile phone.

posted by Koh @ 2:26 PM