Family scheduling
Being a bit of a tech guy, I’m always looking for ways to apply technology to make life easier or to automate mundane jobs. One of my bugaboos has been keeping track of the family schedule. Mrs. Nemasket runs her own Middleboro based business, I’ve got lots of things going on, and the kids have sports and other activities. My wife was generally tracking all this stuff in a weekly planner or on pieces of paper posted in the kitchen – which didn’t do me any good when I was out of the house.
I’m trying Google Calendar as the solution to this problem. All of us have google accounts – which I enabled to use calendaring. There is a pretty usable web interface though usually I view the schedule with Thunderbird – my email client. Out of the box, Thunderbird has no calendaring functionality – it requires the Lightning and Provider plugins. Google Calendar can be configured to send various notifications including text messages to your phone. So – everyone in the family has their own calendar, which is shared with every other member of the family.
This Google-centric solution is working well with my wife’s new smartphone – a Motorola Droid – which runs Google’s Android operating system. The phone hooks into Gmail, gmail contacts, and google calendar pretty effortlessly. Here’s a screenshot of the family schedule as seen from Thunderbird. I’d be interested in how others handle scheduling with their family or small business.
Family calendar as seen from Thunderbird
Themocracy
I still use a paper planner. I have thought about using the calendar feature on my Blackberry or something like Google calendar but haven’t made the switch yet.
There’s a lot to be said for old school day planners and appointment books. Tech solutions like Google calendar have advantages in the ability to share schedules and have electronic reminders. But for sheer no-nonsense – just get the job done simplicity, the paper based solutions certainly have the edge.
I sell a small business mail server that includes calendaring and free/busy scheduling (it works like Exchange). Although my one person business doesn’t really need all the features it provides, I have it installed so I might as well use it. It also does resource scheduling using the same free/busy concept – but I don’t need that
Hmm,,,, resource scheduling is a great feature. One nut I’ve been trying to crack is an open source solution for Mary Barry Massage – something to schedule N-rooms for N-therapists who have different and variable availability. For example. Sally works Mon, Wed, Friday 8-5 except Wednesday works 12-5. Getting a system that handles the booking of massage appointments has proven to be elusive.
I’m in the same boat as you Bumpkin. Ortho & Doctor’s appoinments and all three kids playing sports it’s beome quite a jugggling act. I have been using Outlook for years so it pops up when I turn on the Computer. With that being said, I went to my Google account and was able to Sync both calendars togehter so if I make an appointment in either Google or Outlook, they update each others calendar. It only took me six minutes to set it up.
Thanks BB!
[...] Family scheduling [...]
Well, the product I sell isn’t open source, but it isn’t expensive either – and you know I’d give Mary a deep discount. You can d/l a free trial and try it out.. I think with a little creative thinking you could do it with resource scheduling combined with normal free/busy scheduling.
The part you’d like is that the data files are just vcal text – meaning you can write scripts to create/modify outside of the mailserver.