A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me to coffee. The day before, I sent him a note confirming that I’d see him at 10:15am the next day. Immediately, I got a phone call from him saying, “Gosh, I’d forgotten about this, I’m so glad you sent me a note. I’ll see you there at 10:15am!”
The thought had never occurred to me that there are people out there, who still use their brain as a calendar! I had no idea that there were people in the world that thought their minds work as well for planning and scheduling events as a planner or calendar!
Of course, the realization came – that I too had to miss a number of appointments in order to finally get my life together and set up a rudimentary planner. That, and Steven Covey had to tell me about a hundred times throughout the “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”.
Since then, I’ve tried out many scheduling tools. Currently, I use Google Calendar. Google Calendar allows you to share calendars, so I’ve shared my calendar with my wife. That way we’re sure not to schedule conflicting appointments. What’s really nice is that we don’t have to call each other and confer every time we add an event to the calendar.
Further, we each use Google Sync for our phones. Google Sync synchronizes our phone calendars to our Google Calendars. My Calendar is available online AND its portable. When I’m scheduling my next meeting, I add it on my phone and instantly its available on my Google Calendar and my wife has it in her phone in minutes.
I don’t have to remember when things are, or wait until I get home to look at the family calendar.
This has made it super easy to network with people and set up times to get together with others and be assured that I don’t conflict with other appointments.
During your job search, scheduling is of absolute importance. Make sure you have a way to keep track of appointments. The worst tool you could use is your brain. It’s faulty and has no alarm!
