Thursday, September 22, 2011

The Calming of Chaos

My work life the past five months has ranged from famine to feast. Let's face it—my personal life has been running at the speed of light also. I'm hoping work stays at feast, but feast can be hard to manage.

My boss recently got a new client that seems to be needing my help a lot. I am getting eight-to-ten emails a day from this client with changes that need to be made to their site. All the subject lines end with "ASAP". And you know me—I want to make that happen.

But I'm having a hard time keeping track of everything. Until, that is, a couple of days ago when I realized how Google calendar can help me.

I'm pretty bad about checking my calendar. I keep everything in my head and just start to work on whatever's at the top of my mental heap. But if you go into your Google calendar and click the little gear icon on the upper right - Settings - you'll find your new best friend. (You all use Google calendar, right? You should! It's genius!!)

Click Calendar Settings. On the next screen, under the "Calendar Settings" heading, click Calendar. After the name of your calendar, click Notifications. On the next screen, you're going to specify how you want to be notified. I want a daily agenda, and I want it to hit my inbox before I even wake up. So I click the email checkbox to the right of "Daily agenda".

Genius! Pure freaking genius!! The first thing I do when I wake up is reach for my phone and hit my email button. Right there, in living color, are the items I've got to do. I can let my brain relax from trying to remember everything all night long. I'm good to go.

Try it. You'll like love it.

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