Posts Tagged ‘saisuke’

New sync tool for Google Calendar and your phone

Monday, February 9th, 2009

Google has just released a new tool to sync your Google Calendar to your iPhone or Windows Mobile device, and it’s pretty slick!

For my iPhone, I had previously been using the excellent (but not free) “SaiSuke” app to handle calendaring.  The problem was that you had to manually sync it, and it took a few minutes to sync every time, even over wi-fi.  The Google solution does it via “push” in the background, so you’re always up to date!

In my case, this works out great.  I use Nozbe to handle my actions, which is tied to my Google Calendar.  Any action that has a specific due date shows up in Google Calendar for that date.  Now those automatically sync to my phone.  It’s working very well so far.

A few links to help out for you iPhone users:

The only issue I had is an iPhone limitation — you can only have ONE Exchange account on your phone, and this requires it.  In my case, my work e-mail was already connected via Exchange.  However, I didn’t sync calendar or contacts through it, so I switched it to IMAP and then install Google via Exchange.

Finally, here is a short video showing how it works:

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A good calendar is an assumed GTD prerequisite, isn’t it?

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

When you first start digging into GTD, most models assume that you already have a working, reliable calendar.  You have one, don’t you?

In a talk that David Allen gave a Google a while back, he told the audience that in their time together, none of them were thinking “Where am I going to be a week from Friday at 3:15?”.  The reason is because they trust that system.  They know that their calendar is updated and referenced frequently, so they’ll be aware of any items on their agenda for that day.  That’s what GTD tries to do with the rest of your life.

If you can get all of your tasks into a system, and your mind can trust that you’ll access the system often enough to avoid letting things slip through the cracks, then you can free your mind from worrying about those things.  It’s a beautiful thing.

I don’t think it’s worth getting deep into calendar specifics, but make sure yours is solid.  Most of you have a system that you use and trust, and that’s great.  However, if you’re looking for some ideas to improve your system, I’ll lay mine out and maybe you can get something from it.

  • Google Calendar.  Solid system, accessible from anywhere, easy to share data with co-workers, friends, etc.
  • SaiSuke for iPhone.  It’s $10 (though there is a free test version as well) and it does a great job of syncing itself to your Google Calendar.  Very handy when you’re on the go.
  • Nozbe and Toodledo.  I’m going back and forth between these two programs (more about that in a later post), but both can push your time-sensitive tasks directly to your Google Calendar, or a variety of other calendars such as iCal.
  • Jott.  You can Jott items directly to your calendar.  It’s slick, though I really don’t use it for that very often.
  • You can also SMS items directly to your calendar.  Send a message to 48368 (“GVENT”) with something like “meeting with sue tuesday at 3″ and it’ll put it on there for you.

The other key is to reference it often.  When I’m at home, I leave a browser open with tabs for Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Reader always open so they’re available for quick access.  Other tabs alongside them come and go, but those always remain.

Any other tips for making the best use of your calendar?

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