Get Yourself Organzied - Google Calendar

I've been working with my company for 5+ years now and when I consider everything that I've done to benefit us, I think one of the best improvements was the introduction of Google Calendar.

I started using Google Calendar a few months ago for personal use and I quickly realized that this application would benefit my office staff. We're a very small company (8'ish office employees) and everyone is individually organized but as a group we've failed to communicate and provide updates to our schedules. Translating an individuals organization/schedule to group organization/schedule isn't easy and it's been a challenge to figure what options are best. Some of the staff use calendar software to track multiple schedules, some use Outlook, some use sticky notes. With everyone all over the place, it was important to find a solution that was easy and provided a robust set of options. Google Calendar has filled that necessity.

If you've never used Google Calendar, start up an account asap - it's free and easy. There's so many nifty features on the site that I would be wasting space in this post just listing all the options but here's what I like best and here's why Google Calendar works well for my staff:

Under "My Calendar" you can have more than one calendar that relates to your schedule. This is perfect for managing personal schedules (birthdays, anniversary dates, doctor appointments, etc...) and managing work related schedules (meetings, appointments, office holidays, nap time, etc...) Once you have a calendar created, you can share that with someone else using Google Calendar. I, for example, have two calendars. One is my personal calendar and the other is my work calendar. I have shared that work calendar with my office staff but my personal calendar remains hidden from them. They in turn have done the same thing with their calendars. The information that needs to be shared is now shared w/o compromising personal information.

If you decide to fire up Google Calendar and have questions, let me know. I'd be glad to help.