#cpd23, Thing 8: Google Calendar

I have so very little to say on this subject. Very little indeed. So I've included a lovely picture of a medieval manuscript, courtesy of the Walters Art Museum's Flickr stream. Hold your mouse over the picture for more information.

Walters Art Museum, MS W.78, fol. 6v

I do have a Google calendar, in which I post a few occasional reminders (has the Council Tax money transferred itself? Don't forget that cool ehxibition ends next week). I have a couple of shared calendars (cpd23, TeachMeet), I'm aware of the book due dates sidget doo-dah from our Library (instructions here) - I see the use of all this, I really do.  But I don't have sufficient tech upon my person that an online calendar is more useful than a small diary I carry around with me.

That being said, there's no doubting that for an organisation, Google Calendar is a good way to share events, or for a group of people organising something - once the date/time/place are agreed, only one person needs to input the info and it will synch automatically to everyone's diary.  That ought to stamp out 'oh, I thought we said Tuesday...' and its ilk.

Thing 6: "When my cue comes, call me"

In the interests of testing out your Google Calendar skills, you are all invited to add the concert advertised yonder --> to your Google Calendars. And once it's in your calendar you'll all come to the concert, right?

[ETA: For those reading in a reader, the sidebar information is as follows:

Friday 25 June, 8pm, West Road Concert Hall, Click for more information
]

[Further edited to add that there are instructions for doing this in the comments]

There are several very useful things about Google calendar (here comes another list, because I like lists very much):

1. You can see several different colour-coded calendars all in one view, making it easy to see what's a work event, what's a test match (for those of us left unmoved by this impending World Cup doodah), what's a social engagement, and what's the radio programme you can't bear to miss (although maybe that's redundant calendar use in the iPlayer world).

2. Google will remind you when your event is about to happen via pop-up message, email or text message/SMS.  So there's no excuse for forgetting.  Unless you're logged out of Google, with your phone switched off, and not checking your email.  It could never happen!

3. Being able to share a whole calendar between people, so that a whole group of people can see what's going on.  That's something we could really do with here, but it's likely that imperfect take-up would only make the current problem of multiple diaries worse, and not better.

4. Publicising a single event with a Google Calendar link, so that people can add it to their own calendars easily (have you added my concert yet?).

5. Being able to embed calendars into websites is surely an extremely useful tool for any organisation that has opening hours.  My own undergraduate days were spent squinting at the Pendlebury Library calendar trying to work out if this was a closing-for-lunch or a closing-at-lunchtime day: it would have been so much easier if a widget had just told me what was what!  Equally, it could be useful for clubs, societies, sports teams, orchestras...

However, is Google Calendar for me? Probably not. Why not? Because I don't have one of these new-fangled smart phones (is that even the right name for them?), and I often need to make and check plans when I'm out of touch with the internet. So a paper diary and a stub of pencil tucked into my bag are still the best solution. And you can keep all sorts of useful scraps of paper, billet-doux, photos, poems, etc. in the back of a paper diary. Now someone's going to tell me that there's GoogleZettel, and I'll really have to give in to Google taking over everything I do...