Mike W’s Blog

I’m thrilled with Google Calendar. It has really helped us coordinate schedules here at work, and at home, we no longer have to exchange email lists of events, which we previously had to then manually copy to our respective individual calendars. It’s saving a lot of time. Although Google Calendar doesn’t yet have tasks, there’s a cool web app that does - Remember the Milk.

It allows for prioritization of tasks, reminders, and integrates very nicely with Google Calendar. Once you add the Remember the Milk Calendar, you’ll see the following on your Google Cal which links to your tasks. These can be edited inline via Google Cal.

Among other nice features, if you tag your tasks to represent the nature of the to-do item, a tag cloud can be displayed which takes into account priority and due date. So the bigger the tag appears in the cloud, the more likely it is that the task is on your radar to get done.

I’m beginning to feel more and more that there’s a strong spiritual element to time management. The better I prioritize my work and home tasks, the more attention I seem to give to the right things. I really like Covey’s examples using different size rocks to represent important and not-so-important tasks.

My goal is to make sure I have enough tasks on my list that I can tag as spiritual (time for reading the Bible and other inspirational material, doing something nice for someone just because, or adding issues to prayer). Maybe a shrinking spiritual tag will be a flag to focus on prioritization. Remember the Milk is set up so that tasks are private (unless published), so I’m the only one who can see the tags and the cloud.

It’s worth experimenting with, anyway. If technology can help me be more purposeful with my to do list, then I’m all for it.

It took me a while to get used to the interface (lots of AJAX), but by using keyboard shortcuts (like ‘t’ for new task and ‘d’ for assigning due dates), I was able to quickly add tasks and prioritize them.

It’s been a long time since my last post. February was pretty busy. Last month during a presentation of some Google Earth features, I was wishing I had a tablet so I could scribble some notes and highlight some areas on the map. I found a cheap program for Mac users called desktastic that’s pretty simple and cheap ($12.95) that does a nice job. Here’s a shot of Mt. St. Helens where I jotted a few notes.

As you can see there’s a pencil, stamp, and text tool. Pretty simple stuff but useful. You can assign a key to toggle the program, so that it sits on top of programs or underneath.

Of course you can have fun doodling as well. I think Newton looks pretty cool with the mustache.