How Gmail calendar sharing helped me getting things done after divorce ? [BLO004]

Splitting up or divorcing is never easy. It's a chapter where you close the door of a period in your life. On the other side, it means taking the road to new engagements and opportunities. 

With kids into play we need better ways to manage time and get things done. It's here that innovative calendar technology can play a role as facilitator. Let's have a look.

Kids into play

With kids the door of the past is never closed. Most of the time they need to go alternate at both parents to catch up quality time. This makes frequent travel during weekends, school, holidays,...  an essential part of kids time.

Gmail

With all that travelling, managing whereabouts of your kids gets complicated. Good communication between parents and good time planning is mandatory. My ex-partner and myself are both using Gmail. So we agreed to make a third Google Mail Account to manage kids whereabouts. As agreed we both registered all kids activities in this calendar.

In e.g. every two weekends kids at my place, every thursday, soccer training, school dances, school play, etc....someone wrote down down. By red and blue color labeling the events we could see when kids were at daddys and at moms.. 

What with passwords?

We shared passwords of Gmail account and were both happy. We had one unique calendar we could access, consult, schedule and reschedule. Good Start don't you think?

Issue

There was still one caveat when planning activities. We still had to consult our personal and business calendar separately.

Calendar sharing preferences our savior

The sharing option functionality available in the calendar came at our rescue. In the sharing settings we could add our personal Gmail account. Once the request generated by mail confirmed we could access the calendar as from our accounts.

So login into kids calendar was no longer needed. We could access straight from ours now. In fact the calendar mounted on top of our personal calendar was displayed a separate layer.  This simplified pretty much our lives.  Scheduling and viewing occurred straight from our personal accounts.

Add interesting calendars

I browsed further as from the calendar preferences for interesting public calendars to add. In e.g. I added the public holidays calendar for my country. But last but not least I also mapped my business calendar from Google Apps. So in a glance I could access, consult and even schedule for kids, personal and business events and check free/busy time.

Scheduling has never been easier. By overlaying calendars it became easy to find time that worked for all schedules. Google Calendar? As from now my secret personal assistant.

Takeaway tip 

If you want to stay on top, even while, being on the road I suggest to setup your account on mobile. You can use, mobile devices native app. Google Sync or sync through CALDAV. Way to go ! 

Referring tips

• Next post is for bikers where I'll show how you can import GPX data from your Garmin bike computer into Google Maps. 

Feedback

Leave any questions or comments below.  How do you organise your whereabouts for the kids ? Are there other timesavers you know about you can share?

Tweet Buffer