Thing #17: Shared Calendars in MS Outlook

I use online calendars a lot. A ton. Almost constantly, to tell the truth. At my old job as a teacher-librarian I was juggling so many balls that without my calendar (and the old catalog cards on which I kept a constantly-updated set of to-do lists) I would have been utterly lost.

These days, I use Microsoft Outlook for my work calendar and Google Calendar to coordinate my schedule at home: my spouse, my daughter, and I each have a different complex and variable schedule that could change at a moment's notice, so we finally jettisoned our paper calendar and rely on Google to keep track of our work schedules and auxiliary shifts and PAC meetings and childcare needs and birthday parties and piano lessons and...and...and...I'm sure I'm forgetting something; let me check my calendar ;-)

So inviting people to meetings isn't new for me, but I'd never known about shared exchange calendars, so it was neat to poke my virtual head into the LV Board Room and see what's going on there.

One caveat/funny story about using Outlook to schedule meetings: five or six years ago, at my old job, I was scheduled to go into a classroom to teach some information skill or online database. I made myself an Outlook appointment so I'd remember it, and invited the classroom teacher as well. I set the pop-up reminder to two days ahead of time, so that I'd remember to prep and make handouts for the lesson.

Little did I know that this meant that the classroom teacher would also get a pop-up reminder two days early. Being something of a technological novice, she couldn't figure out how to make it stop popping up-- I think she was setting it to "snooze" so it kept showing up every ten or fifteen minutes--and eventually she came over to the library to complain and ask me to please stop constantly emailing to remind her about the session!

After that, I stopped setting reminders ahead of time when inviting others to a meeting; instead, I made myself a separate meeting or task at the same time and put the reminder on that. Complicated, but it worked.