So I’m still sort of in the process of building my “life management system”, the goal of which is to make it completely digital, while also attempting to make it as fool proof as my old Franklin Planner. Google Calendar is, so far, the foundation for this system.
I really haven’t been using Google Calendar all *that* long, but I’ve already come up with a list of things I wish it did. Here they are, in no particular order:
- Allow multiple-select of events. I’d like to be able to select more than one event, and change those aspects of both events at the same time that do not cause ambiguities or weirdness. For example, I should be able to select two events, one on Monday and one on Wednesday, and move them both to Friday, or drag them both to a different calendar to associate them with that calendar.
- Allow grouping of calendars. I make a calendar for each project I’m working on, and I also have calendars for my personal life. When I’m at work, it’d be nice to remove all personal events from my calendar with one click. If I could put my calendar, my wife’s calendar, and our family events calendar in a group of calendars called “Personal”, you could then put a check box on “Personal” to show/hide all of those calendars easily. A second wonderful side effect of this is that I could group all of my work-related calendars under the “Work” group, and then automatically share all of those calendars with my boss by sharing my “Work” group with him, instead of all of my individual work calendars.
- Consolidate events from multiple calendars into one calendar. So, I subscribe to the US Holidays calendar, and I have my own “Special Events” calendar that holds birthdays and stuff. It’d be nice if I could configure the US Holidays calendar to show up as events on my Special Events calendar, for a few of reasons: 1) I could then hide the US Holidays calendar making my calendar list less cluttered, because 2) I could check/uncheck the one calendar to hide both events. Finally, I’d use fewer colors, making my calendar a little less crazy.
- Speaking of color, I have two requests here: first, give me a color picker instead of limiting my color options. Second, let me change the font colors in all-day events. Yellow background with white text is hard to read on my laptop screen. It would also let me more quickly pick things out. I could, for example, use red backgrounds for all-day events on two calendars, and differentiate between the two quickly by falling back on the font color.
- For crying out loud, give me a half-decent todo list similar to the integration tools by Remember the Milk or ToodleDo. It would be one less service to cobble into my system. I know there’s a home page plugin, but I want a single view of all my stuff, and I want that to be my calendar. I’ve never been able to consistently keep a home page.
Once these are out of the way, I have more wishes based on these wishes. For example, once there’s a google todo list, it will immediately make sense to send me a message via Google Talk around lunch time to remind me that I said I’d have ‘X’ completed by the end of the day.
technorati tags:googlecalendar, google, calendar, timemanagement, technology, tasklist
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