Syncing Calendars

How many of us use Outlook on a daily basis? Do you use the calendar in an attempt to stay sane with your crazy schedule? I always seem to be on the move and have a tendency to forget things unless I write them down. In an effort to feel more streamlined in my daily life for both work and personal life I have started putting all events onto a calendar. Now while this might seem like a great idea the actual outcome was far from desirable due to the fact that I was using a Google calendar for scheduling rooms at work, an Outlook calendar to plan my work schedule, and Google/Yahoo/iCloud calendars for my personal life. For some people this might not be an issue but for me it is. I want to be able to input the information onto the calendar for which it is intended but also see all of the calendars at the same time so that I can ensure I’m not overlapping at any point in time (I still haven’t figured out how to be in two places at the same time yet it is not from a lack of trying.)

The solution that I have come up with is to input the information into the proper calendar but to make my primary mode of viewing the calendars be my iPhone. While I was able to setup some calendars directly on my iPhone, I was having difficulty sending my work calendar from Outlook. The simple solution for me was to use Google Calendar Sync. Using this program I have been able to sync my Outlook email with a Google account (I use the library Google account to then forward the information to my phone). The one drawback that I have encountered in using Google Calendar Sync is that the two-way syncing never seems to send the information to my Outlook calendar but due to how I’m using the calendars this has not been an issue. Hopefully some of you out there will find this helpful but the biggest thing I learned from using this service is that if you have a need or a want there’s most likely an application or program out there for it and you can almost always find it for free.