A few years ago I caught a glimpse of my sister’s calendar and saw that she had everything including time for sleeping specifically scheduled. I teased her about it for months before I realized she was a genius. The day I completed my cancer treatment, I knew I would need that sort of structured routine to remind me to keep putting myself first.
I’m a big fan of computer based calendars because of the ability to create repeating events and the ability to drag and drop those events to rescheduled things as needed.
I color my routine calender a soft and soothing green to remind me that while those items are all important enough to be on my calender, they’re not set in stone and I can be flexible. My other calenders for things that need to be done at specific times are in darker colors: red, purple, and blue for personal, work, and blogging events including things like appointments, classes, and social events and I use my orange shopping calendar to keep track of certain sales or expiration dates I don’t want to miss.
My routine gives me 8 hours of sleep. Plenty of time for some casual coffee and email or blog reading before work. Dedicated time for my puppy, working out, eating, showering, blogging, keeping up my nails myself, and reading before bed on a regular basis.
I also made sure that my schedule allows for a few hours every evening and plenty of time on the weekends for relaxing and seeing my boyfriend, family, and other friends.
Say you’re planning a trip and want to keep other people up to date on your itinerary. Those people might include people you’re traveling with, people you are visiting, or people you expect to drop you off and pick you up at the airport.
With iCal and Mobile Me (or you’re own server), you can publish your calendar so that those other people can subscribe to it and have any changes you make the calender automatically updated on their end as well. Most iCal users are already familiar with subscribing to this style of published calendar to automatically populate their iCal with holidays.
Go to File > New Calendar and create a new calendar that will contain only the items you want to share.
Move any existing items for the trip to your new calender and add any new items as you plan them.
Then go to Calendar > Publish
If you want any changes or additions you make to this calendar to be sent out, make sure the Publish changes automatically option is checked.
Then hit publish and the next box will give you a url that you can email to the select friends and family you want to view that calendar.
Once they get that email, your friends and family can subscribe to your calendar to have it show up on their iCal. If they don’t have a Mac and use iCal, they can also simply view the calendar at the url it was published to. No matter what, no one has any excuse for not picking you up at the airport because they didn’t have a copy of your current itinerary.
If you don’t have Mobile Me or your own server to publish the calendar to, you can use the File > Export option and email a calendar file to your friends and family, but that calendar won’t automatically update with changes the way a published calendar will. Instead, you’d have to send a new copy of the file each time you made changes that you wanted people to know about.
Shared in Works for me Wednesday.
While discussing our computer uses the other day, my brother said, “You can learn a lot about somebody by looking at what’s in their dock.”
Let’s take a look at mine:
My interests span media, the internet, graphic design, and gaming (strictly when those games are well designed with the Mac in mind) and that is clearly reflected in my dock.
I’m currently running Snow Leopard and I make good use of several of the programs that come on all Macs:
- iTunes
- iCal
- Address Book
- iChat
- Text Edit
- iPhoto
I also frequently use some free software including:
- Firefox
- TweetDeck
- Amazon MP3 Downloader
My software picks in terms of what I needed to buy to are:
- Microsoft Office
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Illustrator (I’m still using Adobe CS2 since that’s what I bought with the educational discount while in college and haven’t needed to upgrade badly enough to pay full price yet)
- World of Warcraft (geeky as it is, this is the best designed game for Mac)
- Spore
- The Sims 3
- Turbo Tax (this doesn’t actually make it into the dock since I only need it for a few days each tax season but I buy it every year)
So tell me, what’s in your dock?
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