Keeping Up With My Schedule

I’m procrastinating again. I have tons of work stuff to do, a 7-room house to pack up for moving, shopping to do for graduation, and a whole bunch of shit I don’t want to deal with. So instead, I’m trying to catch up my feeble mind with different tech tools I’ve been meaning to play with and finishing up a “diabolical” SuDoKu puzzle.

I’m currently learning how to export my Outlook Calendar to my Google Calendar. I’ve gotten smart by consolidating my personal calendar with my work schedule by using a Smartphone that synchronizes with my laptop. Now, if I can train my friends to look up my availability on-line, then I might just vastly improve my time management effectiveness here. The key is to block off personal time for myself on my calendars as well so I can protect my most precious time from time-wasters (yeah, you know who you are).

So far, there are only two annoyances I’ve observed with this feature. The first one is with the time zone. If the original invitation/meeting request that was sent to my Outlook originated from someone in a different time zone, it will import to the Google calendar at that person’s time zone, not mine. For example, meeting request received from Ohio for 10:30 AM Eastern went in to my Outlook calendar for 7:30 AM Pacific (because of my local time). When the information is imported from my Outlook to Google, it will populate it at 10:30 AM Pacific.

Second annoyance (which is a disaster if you have a lot of items on your calendar) is the “Available” / “Busy” designation for your events. Everything you import from your Outlook Calendar, even “All Day Events” you have as free on it, will mark you as “Busy” in Google Calendar. When creating events directly in Google Calendar, “All Day Events” will automatically default to “Available” and timed events default to “Busy”. However, when you import from Outlook, everything defaults to busy. Aaarrrgghhh!!

This little project just turned in to a major integration issue. I would do so much better keeping up with schedule if I just quit screwing around to begin with. But, what’s the fun in that?