Consolidating your calendars # Productivity Tip

I was going crazy with the different calendars and the email accounts that i had to manage. Worst still, most of these calendars were dealing with international clients, so I was getting lost if time zone conversions and was scheduling double meetings at the same time.

Ok, let me start from the beginning. I have 5 active email addresses. I have a personal email, an email for my company, and three email accounts under my clients domain names. All these emails are Google Apps emails (not all of them were influenced by me, but nevertheless a wise choice). And all of them have calendars associated with them.

And the three clients are in three different time zones! So when I have meetings, or get meeting invites, I had to go through my other calendars to see whether I had a conflicting appointment with another client. And it became worse when I had to schedule meetings or when clients told me to setup meetings and mention their local time.

So I decided to create a master calendar with subscriptions to all my other calendars. I chose my personal calendar as the master calendar due to the fact that it is not shared with others and even if it does get shared, it will be with my family. Thus I do not run the risk of exposing my work with one client to another.

Such a consolidation on GCal was pretty easy. I added my other emails under “Add Another Calendar” –> “Add a coworkers calendar”. Then GCal triggered an email requesting permission and all I had to do was clicking on a link and saving the sharing setting on the invitees email. Voila, the tasks were appearing on the master calendar. And better still they were all color coded in different colors for each calendar!

Then my worry was that I had setup Push Sync for my personal calendar to my iPhone. So I was not sure whether the events would get pushed back through that somehow. But the events that got pushed to the iPhone from my personal calendar were only the events that were created on it.

Next I wanted to setup my iPhone also to have a consolidated view. This was darn easy again. All I had to do was to add the calendars as CalDAV accounts. TO do that go to: Settings –> Mail, Contacts, Calendars –> Add Account –> Other –> Add CalDAV account. Out google.com as server, your email (with domain) as user name and your password and a meaningful name for description. And voila!

Just one thing about iPhone CalDAV. All the CalDAV calendars show up color coded in blue and my primary calendar (sync’d as an Exchange server) in red. Now if I can color code different calendars, it would be perfect!

I just love the ability to see my whole life in one view, both on the computer (on the cloud) and on my phone.

Oh there is one more thing I wish for. That is a similar way to consolidate the tasks onto one Gmail Task List!