We’ve been working as the Pixeladies since 2003 (wow!) and started off with our nifty online Yahoo calendar that we used for everything. It seemed to work just fine, thank you very much, and I (Kris) had no need to change. Deb, on the other hand, is always rooting around the technosphere looking for ways to help the Pixeladies work better administratively and creatively. Well, Deb came across the Google calendar, and after a bit of harrumphing on my part, talked me into trying the Google calendar. You can imagine how hard it must be for me to say this, but Deb was RIGHT! We switched in January 2009, and I love the Google calendar! Why? We actually have several Google calendars! We each have our personal calendars, a Pixeladies calendar, and calendars for a couple of organizations we belong to. One great thing is that we can turn each calendar on and off at will. Take a look at our “calendar” that is currently showing our “Pixeladies” calendar and our “Do/Done” calendar.
Here are some other cool features: we can color code each calendar, we can set each event either within a specific time frame or as an all-day event, we can change the calendar view (view by month, week, day, or even in agenda form), and we can print any combination of calendars (with their color coding intact!). We won’t go into the how-to’s here because it’s really easy to set up – just check out Google’s calendar page. What we want to stress is the WHY you would create a Google calendar (or several). For us, we’ve saved a lot of bureaucratic time and, most importantly, we’ve actually gotten more stuff done!
Take a look at our calendar again and check out the Do/Done calendar. We actually sit down and enter our To Do list as all-day events. We can put the item on any particular day, so if we know we have to write an article by, say, November 30, for example, our to do list reflects that. We’re not sitting around with a tattered slip of paper that we keep misplacing. (Did I mention that we can access our Google calendars on our smart phones?) As the days go by, we either put an X in front of the item to say we did that particular job, OR we simply click, hold, and drag that item to the following day (and sometimes the following week). After a while, we sometimes get a day on which we now have 15 things to do ’cause we’ve been procrastinating a bit too much. Well, that darn Do/Done calendar has really held our feet to the fire on more than one occasion – there’s no avoiding work when you’re swimming in a sea of (in our case) green events!
One final feature: You can color code individual events within your calendar. If you look at our Pixeladies calendar – the red events – you’ll notice that our upcoming “Intro PSE” class runs for three weeks, but it’s not listed in red but in a light orange. That’s because Deb can’t stand to see a bright red ribbon hanging around for three weeks, so she just picked a softer color! Speaking of “Intro PSE,” we are teaching our online course, “Introduction to Photoshop Elements for Fiber Artists and Sewing Enthusiasts,” again starting September 17. Registration starts today. Click here to read more about our class.