Thing 6 - Google calendar

I must say, I'm quite a fan of the Google calendar and have been using it on and off for several years. It's an easy and very efficient way of keeping track of various commitments, or even various types of commitments (work, home, friends, family, anything you like really...), you don't need to have your paper diary with you all the time (and I must admit, I don't take my work diary on holiday with me for example!) but you can update it from wherever you have an Internet connection. Yes, the downside is that you delve a little bit deeper into the dark clutches of the Evil Google Empire... but then again I'm there already, doomed as can be, so what the heck, eh?

I'm saving even more time now since I've manage to sync it to my BlackBerry calendar, although to be fair I'm still ironing out some niggles there. I can see potential there though and will definitely persevere with it.

Several points I mentioned when looking at Doodle also apply here, mainly that we don't really need Google calendar within our small, straighforward library environment, since our old-fashioned paper diary works just fine and we all work closely together. However, I can see Google calendar being a useful tool for split site libraries, or for managing libraries where staff work shifts or flexible hours: it allows everyone to see who's busy when and can save a lot of time from the tedious to-ing and fro-ing involved in setting up a meeting - even better, use it in conjunction with Doodle to target days and times when people don't already have commitments before sending out a Doodle link. Since you can set up several calendars, the possibilities are endless: you can have one for your own commitments at work, one for each of your co-workers, one for your family commitments, one for your spouse/partner's commitments, one for each of the children... and you can choose who you share each on with.

One little dampener on this general enthusiasm though: while I can appreciate Google calendar could work brilliantly within Cambridge, for coordinating meetings with people from various libraries for example, I would still be slightly wary about using it outside of the Cambridge environment. Something about it looking a little bit too much like fun maybe?

Yup, there's no two ways about it, I'm definitely a fan and will carry on using it for my personal organisational headaches (no more triple-booking myself, hurray!), though not necessarily at work.

Thing 5 - Doodle

Aha, now I'm a huge fan of Doodle for setting up any kind of appointment or meeting, and the more people involved the better a tool Doodle becomes, as it removes the flurry of emails and subsequent waste of time involved... or so you'd think. The last three times I've used it people have rather annoyingly reverted back to email to qualify their statement or even worse, repeat it. Now people, that was the whole point of setting up a Doodle link in the first place!

On the plus side, it's incredibly easy to set up and removes so much unnecessary faffing about: Doodle calculates the best date and time for your meeting based purely on numbers and what people have input, end of story. With 5 day-time staff our Library is too small to make using Doodle an efficient internal tool - our good old paper diary does the trick just fine thank you - but to set up meetings with anybody else, be they academics or librarians at other libraries, it's just invaluable. I love it.