Day four without electricity, just in case you’re keeping count. I certainly am.
Anyway, to business. If you’ve ever tried to arrange a meeting or event with two or more people, you’ll know how convoluted it can get - you send an email asking for suggested dates, someone sends some to the group, someone else responds that they can’t make those but they can make these, and pretty soon the whole thing’s a mess and no-one is talking to anyone.
What can make this a lot easier, and make you a lot less frightened to open your email, is shared calendars. There are a variety of apps to do this, but the only one I’ve used is Google Calendar - I’d love to hear of others, if you used something else.
The idea is that you can make aspects of your calendar visible to others: not the sordid details of exactly what you’re doing and with whom, unless you choose to trumpet that to the world, but a simple “free/busy” indicator. This cuts out the first dozen or so emails you’d otherwise get, and lets the group at least agree on what dates aren’t in play. And the ability to sync with (at least) Outlook means that it should be seamless: you use your work Outlook calendar, and it gets synced quietly to Google.
Even if it’s only one person who wants a slice of your time, you can point them at your calendar and let them work it out. This saves an awful lot of tedious to-ing and fro-ing with someone who can’t decide about the times you’ve suggested, wants something better, but won’t let go of the ones they’ve got just in case. Let them fossick in your calendar and come to you when they’ve decided
The downside, that I’ve found, is that Google Calendar has some anomalous syncing behaviour. As far as I can tell, it goes like this: if there are two distinct Outlook calendars on a server that are shared to some degree, Google calendar sucks them both up to sync with either calendar. Oops. So both your work calendar and your pigeon-fancying timetable can get synced to your Google work calendar: can be embarrassing.
Other than that, it’s a groovy idea, with certain caveats. I’d like to hear from anyone who’s used an online calendar, and what they liked/didn’t like about it.
In the meantime, I’ll be hoping to get back on my own computer in my own house tomorrow night. Wish me luck - and power.