Post-holiday pile-up: Doodle and Google Calendar

I feel that it is somewhat ironic that all sense of organisation and good timekeeping has fallen down around my ears just as the section "Organising Yourself" comes along.

Strandkörbe (Beach baskets) on Juist
Photo: wetterolf on flickr

Admittedly I have a pretty good excuse in having spent the last two weeks jollying across Europe (and a smidge of Asia), as four plane journeys through 8 different airports, along with an assortment of metros, trams, trains and horse-taxis (no, really) saw me have a cracking week in the historic yet contemporary city of Istanbul, followed by a week of winding-down on the West Frisian island of Juist.

However, dreams of sumptuous Ottoman luxury and white North Sea coasts must be put to one side as I peek nervously at my Hermes inbox and try to work out where the hell I'm meant to be in the next couple of weeks. Handily, Things 7 & 8 are here to help me out.

Though I have never initiated a Doodle poll myself, I have participated in many as they seem to be the Cambridge librarian's (certainly the grad trainee's) tool of choice for getting lots of busy people in the same place at the same time. It's pretty basic but it does the job: it allows you to offer plenty of dates, to see what people before you have been thinking (sheep logic still prevails, we cannot deny it) and recently it has been developed to allow you to express a preference - who knew that orange was the colour of indecision? However, it is limited in that if there's a dead heat, you're still going to end up having a long-winded email thread. Oh, if only there was an online coin you could flip...wait, how about here? Or the slightly more direct:

The virtual universe has decided for me...
From www.random.org

So once I know where and when I'm going, it's all about how I'm going to remember. My memory swings between pretty good (especially with random factoids) and pretty awful (with most things useful), so clearly something to check against would be useful. Like Gareth, I was a slave to my pocket diary during my degree, particularly during my Year Abroad when I was teaching English in a lycée without around 200 students under my belt. Responsible, non?

My life = a candy-striped bundle of things waiting
to be forgotten

But out in the big, wide, deadline-less world (well, mostly) my diary has been somewhat ignored this year. Through luck rather than judgment (and thanks in no small part to the insane organisational skills of Erin) I have not missed anything important this year (if I have, I can't remember it!), but of course with so many and varied responsibilities at work, plus the need to liaise with colleagues, relying on my memory is unlikely to cut it. Luckily, our library is quite a heavy user of Google Calendar, and my reliance upon it has definitely increased over the year. While I'm not convinced that my colleague's permanent and repeated notice to WATER PLANTS has had any effect on my horticultural awareness, it is easy to plan holidays, mark in trainee trips and even include reminders to chase periodicals using a platform available to the whole team. I'm even trying to extend my use of it outside of purely work - I can view the work calendar on my personal calendar so I'm reminded of trips away and, though this may sound a bit odd, my boyfriend and I have shared our calendars with each other, as he starts as a junior doctor in Salisbury on Thursday. It just seems like a less messy way to know when he's on nights than a) asking all the time or b) ringing up at the wrong time...

Enough of that. The downsides to Google Calendar? Well, the new Google update isn't pretty, that's for sure. There is also a temptation solely to mark things as "All day" events, because ones with specific times can get lost on small screens and collapse down to +3 more if it's a busy day. I'm also unconvinced by the reminder system - my Gmail inbox is increasingly clogged with reminders, but Google Calendar has to be permanently open for the pop-up box to be useful...what I'd really like it to do is just read my mind and fill in the gaps, but I feel the technology isn't quite there yet.

Anyway. As a last little bit of library geek-out before I go, and because it has become customary for the trainees to take pictures of libraries whilst on holiday, here's the fantastic ceiling display at the library in Istanbul Modern art museum:

Photo: Pascal Gillet at Traffic Magazine