Five Best Reasons to Use Google Calendar

Are you one of those people that would forget their own birthday if they didn't have it on a calendar somewhere?  How about friend birthdays, anniversaries, or important meetings?  One too many times I have either double-booked an appointment or completely forgot about something I had to do.  I used to keep a written planner/calendar in college, but I wouldn't use it everyday and would forget to check it.  In the age of technology, Internet, and cell phones there has to be a better way.  Enter Google Calendar (*heroic music*).

With Google Calendar, you can create one or more calendars, set appointments, reoccurring events, attach notes, invite friends and much much more.  Here are my five best reasons you should be using Google Calendar.

1. Your calendar lives on the web and can be accessed from nearly anywhere.  One problem I always had with planners was that I never had one around when I needed it.  Thankfully, I don't have to lug around my laptop either since I have a cell phone that has a web connection.  With my iPhone I have actually set up my phone calendar to auto-sync with my Google calendar so when I add a date to my calendar on my phone, it gets added to my Google Calendar and vice-versa.
   
   
2. Never miss an appointment with reminders.  Every event you add to your calendar has it's own reminder settings.  You can set up your reminders to notify you hours or days before your appointment with a popup (most useful with the iPhone or a computer with a calendar always open in the browser), email (very useful for us GTD poeple) and best of all.... SMS text messages!
   
   
3. Share your calendar with others.  You can choose to make your calendar private or public, share the url of your calendar for others to view online, or add one or more co-authors who can cooperatively create new events and edit yours.  This is super handy for people who work together or couples that make plans together (while they are apart).  For instance, my girlfriend and I have a shared calendar that we can add to with dinner dates and important upcoming events we need to remind the other about.
   
   
4. Create multiple calendars and subscribe to other calendars.  You might want more than one calendar to work with in order to keep things organized.  You could have one for personal use, one for public meetings, one for your organization or work appointments, and one for birthdays.  Each calendar you create can be color-coded and have it's own personal settings so you can make it private or public, or share it with your friends.
   
   
5. Search your calendars.  Search is what Google does best and this goes for your calendars as well.  Search for a person's name, or name of an event.  In the advanced search you can limit it to a specific date range, or location, person, or search only one calendar (or all of them).

There is much more that Google Calendar has to offer, things like the ability to link to and auto-sync with Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird, offer public and private iCal addresses, embedding the calendar in a website, a Tasks Manager, and offline synchronization.  Try Google Calendar today!