5 ways Google Calendar is turning into my ultimate productivity system.

Open Thinkering Productivity, Google Calendar

I still write to-do lists, but I no longer use Remember The Milk nor have I ever used any kind of GTD system. At work I’ve been using TeuxDeux to make sure I get certain things done on specific days, but increasingly Google Calendar does everything I need it to. 🙂

Let’s examine the evidence:

  1. Natural language recognition

I can type in Phone David at 1pm on Thursday and Google Calendar will do something sensible with it. Being able to add and delete quickly is really important to a lightweight, yet effective productivity system.

  1. Mobile access

Now that I’ve got a Google Android phone it’s easy to access and add things to my Google Calendar. It was a bit of a bind to do so previously as the iPhone required 3rd party apps to synchronize.

  1. Reminders

I’m not always in front of a computer, but I pretty much always have my mobile phone with me. Setting SMS reminders as well as pop-ups covers all the bases.

  1. Google Tasks integration

If I really need to write a to-do list relating to a project, a Google Tasks widget can be added to the sidebar. The genius, but very simple, thing about this is that items on the list can have ‘parents’ and ‘children’ (i.e. dependencies).

  1. See at a glance what other people are doing

It’s trivial to share your Google calendar (either all details or free/busy) with other people. And you can then ask them to do likewise with you. If they only use Microsoft Outlook’s calendar then suggest they use Google Calendar Sync!