Thing 14: Online Productivity Tools

Let me use this “thing” to share with you my love for calendars. When I was in 10th grade, I suddenly figured out that if I wanted to get into college I needed to get my act together. I’d been doing well in school, but I wanted to do more. And better. And faster. And easier.

My best friend was doing all sorts of snazzy extracurricular stuff, on a billion committees in clubs, going to afterschool programs, in plays and still maintaining an A average. How did she do it? She had a Daytimer.

I’ve been a Daytimer advocate ever since – I have a current one on my shelf now as a matter of fact. I rarely use it, though, because I’ve transitioned to my Palm-enabled cellphone. Now, I have all my contacts, information and calendars on my phone whenever I need it. And, it buzzes me when I have an appointment coming up – my old Daytimer never did that! It doesn't have that loved, pencil-scratched in feel that my Daytimer had, though. There's something that grabs me when I have that visual representation of my life on paper. My busy life feels real once it's been noted, reviewed and checked off.

I had great fun looking through the online calendars and other productivity tools. I’m most intrigued about calendars so after I created an IGoogle page (pretty!) I searched through the recommended calendars in the “Web’s Best Calendars” article. I can’t wait to try out Scrybe, I put myself on the list for that one. (if you have an invite could you send me one?) My husband uses Yahoo calendar for his DJ business. It’s easy and it’s nice because we can both log in at any time and see what’s up.

Libraries can use these calendars in many ways. We are going to be ditching our meeting room reservation books soon for a shared Outlook calendar. I can’t wait to do this – it has so many features that will make scheduling and tracking our reservations easier and more efficient. It also has protections that let you choose who has permission to change or edit entries. This requires some consulting with our MIS department so any library could use one of these online calendars instead to achieve the same result. I see how libraries could switch to these calendars for equipment reservations and project management, too. Let's get organized People!