Getting Your Messy Calendar Under Control 

A business calendar is an essential tool for keeping track of appointments and deadlines. When you don’t keep a calendar and have a poor memory, things can go from bad to worse quickly.

Electronic calendars still pose a challenge to many people and businesses. Some reasons are listed below.

• Before they start their business, they have a job. They use their email calendar for their personal lives, which makes sense.
• Upon starting their business, they decide to separate their personal and professional lives. Then they get a new work email account. Now there are two calendars.
• In some cases, they get a “paid domain” email account. You also get a calendar, so now you have three places to log in and keep track of things.

People who want to keep “work” and “personal” lives separate usually resist this idea.

However, you can only be in one place at a time since there is only one of you. It makes sense to consolidate everything into one location. 
Other people’s calendars can appear (with their permission). The ability to toggle on and off client calendars can make scheduling meetings easier and reduce confusion.
While this may take some time, it’s worth the effort.

Here’s how you can get started.

1. Select the calendar you want to use. Open the other calendars and manually transfer appointments. The alternative is to hire a professional to move the items for you. Check the upcoming year to make sure you don’t miss any recurring events, such as birthdays.
2. Check that calendar invitations are being sent and received at the email address provided in the calendar.
3. Separate business and personal events with “event colours”.
4. Get other calendar owners, such as your children or significant other, to share theirs with you. You can find step-by-step directions for Google Calendar Sharing here and for Outlook Sharing here.

Consolidating your calendars will give you access to everything you need across all devices.