So that covers how I have made my contacts sane and available. What about calendars?

I have a bit of a complicated life, so I have a few different types of calendars:

• Home, social, and personal stuff
• My day job
• Assorted other professional and industry engagements

The best way to get things all extra organized and available so that you can access your changing life on the go is to get it synced across your devices and available online.

It would also nice to be able to subscribe to associates, socialites, and arch enemies calendars. All of this can be done with Google Calendar and, to my knowledge, no one else easily. I’m going to focus on easy here as publishing a public ical via WebDAV or other calendaring application is more trouble than it is worth when Google will do it for you.

Since I have this complicated life, I’m going to have to make another flowchart to so my daring love triangle of directional sync with OSX, Windows, Google, ipods, and Symbian. I make it sound complicated, but the use of it all is quite simple because the changes flow into each other so that everything magically stays in sync. If you make too many changes too quickly in too many places, you could wind up with sync issues which are never fun to resolve. So please. Figure out where you work effectively and keep it as simple as possible. Hopefully you’ll never know what people are talking about when they complain about their sync issues.

Google bidirectional sync for iCal and Mozilla products can be found here.

Note how having your act together with your address book at this point helps out your use of calendaring? You might want to do that first if you haven’t already.

The Calaboration app (gotta love bad puns) is pure simplicity to use to configure ical to have read/write access to your online calendar with in your Google account.

Click OK and it will be done. Optionally when your initial sync is complete, open up your ical preferences and into account settings to set how often you want it to sync; manually, or every 1, 5, 15, or 30 minutes.

The Google Calendar bidirectional connecter for Outlook is called Google Calendar Sync (how about that) and can be found here and looks like this:

In the end, it looks like this.

Each location will be able to make changes to the calendar and have them be propagated to the others at the interval that they are configured to sync. Additionally, any web browser can be used to log into Google Calendar and make or delete entries if using these are inconvenient for some reason.

I use a few other tricks for private entries, birthdays, and the like to keep myself organized, but I thought that the low-hanging fruit example would be valuable.

Please let me know if this makes your life a bit easier.