This week I am writing a series of blog posts about how to use apps to organise your time. I have chronic problems with attending appointments, meetings, seminars and lectures. I go to sleep too late at night and forget to check my calendar for the next day. Then after I wake up and have a leisurely mooch through social media thinking I have a free day, my stomach drops as I suddenly remember I had a vital appointment that morning that I had forgotten. My ‘base-camp’ of organisation is Google Calendar, I primarily use the desktop browser version, which is synced with my mobile devices. Throughout this week I will also discuss other organisational tools including browser extensions, the IOS calendar, Google Keep, Evernote, plus I will also list a few other apps that are worth checking out.
Google Calendar
Available on: IOS, Android, In-Browser
Features:
- Sync multiple email accounts
- Notifications
- Colour coordinate events
- Sync with Google Keep reminders and notes
- Schedule events to repeat daily, weekly, monthly indefinitely or up until a cut-off date (e.g. A lecture that repeats every Monday until the end of term.)
- Colour coordinate different Calendars
- Month, week, 4 day or agenda view
How to:
Open the Google calendar web page or app on your mobile device (If you’re using an iPad you’ll have to download the iPhone version from the app store, which isn’t configured to be as visually appealing, or use Google Calendar in your browser).
You should sign into whichever email account you want to associate your calendar with. I have chosen to sign into my Uni email (@sheffield.ac.uk). You can add multiple gmail accounts and also sync facebook events onto your calendar, but I have disabled this for now as it cluttered mine up too much.
(For information on how to sync facebook events and birthdays please click here)
Above you can see my completed calendar.
Select from what kind of calendar entry you want to create (event, reminder, appointment) and press create. The actual time slot can be changed in the main view by using the slider when you hover your mouse over the boundaries of the entry. Otherwise, you can edit further detail in the ‘edit event’ section.
Above, I am editing the repetition and reminder settings. This is for a weekly learning mentor appointment, which I have set to repeat weekly, ending on 15/12/2016 which is just after my last appointment before term ends for Winter Break. Below you can see how you can edit your notifications for events, which will show up on your mobile device (if you ensure that your device allows the google calendar app to display notifications). You can also change the colour of each event, which I use, for example, to colour code my different lectures and seminars. The colours I use correspond with the colour of dividers and highlighters I use for my notes which helps me keep my modules separate for me throughout the semester and is really useful for revision.
Integrated Google Calendar addon
Available on: Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome
Features:
- In-browser notifications
- One-click view and edit your Google Calendar
In addition to my mobile device notifications, I use an add on for my web browser (Firefox) that enables me to access my Calendar with one click and allows Google Calendar to push notifications through in-browser. This is useful if you don’t constantly check your mobile devices/ leave your phone in your coat downstairs while you embark on a netflix binge etc. On Friday I sheduled a reminder to take my washing out. As 4.45pm rolled around my browser displayed the following image, and didn’t allow me to press anything else until I acknowledged the notification by pressing ‘ok’ or exiting out of the pop up. (This tutorial and all demonstration images are taken from the Firefox add-on as that’s my main browser, I haven’t used the Chrome version and unfortunately Safari doesn’t offer a similar extension, but I will discuss how to sync Google Calendar to iCalendar in tomorrow’s post)
Thanks for reading,
Rachel