How I Handle Personal and Work Calendars (on Different Platforms)

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today's video, I'll share how I deal with personal and work calendars.

I recently started a new job at a place that used Microsoft Office Suite including Outlook.  Since every other place I've worked has used Google Suite, it has taken me some time to determine how to manage my work and home calendars with this new job.

Just to give you a lay of the land, up until now I have had essentially two calendars -- my family calendar that all of the members of my family can view and write to and my personal calendar which my family members can also view, but they usually keep turned off since the appointments are when they are at work or school.  And that is usually how I determine where appointments go -- if it happens on evenings and weekends, it goes on the family calendar -- even if I'm the only person affected.  That way, everyone can see that I'm busy and what I'm doing.  If the event happens during normal work or school hours, it goes on my personal calendar since presumably everyone is occupied during that time and doesn't care as much what I might be doing.  I access Google Calendar on a browser or the app for iPhone or iPad. I use my calendar A TON and also get a daily agenda each morning for the events that should happen that day.

For my new job, any appointments scheduled by work colleagues will be sent to my Outlook calendar, which I also access through a browser or a mobile app.  For a while, I tried to keep all of my work appointments in the Outlook calendar.  However, particularly since I work from home a couple of days a week, I wanted to be able to view those appointments in my main calendar rather than having to switch between apps to view work appointments.  The first thing I tried was to share my Outlook calendar through a URL with Google Calendar.  In order to do this, I clicked on settings in Outlook, then view all Outlook settings, then Shared Calendars, and then I published the calendar and copied the link.  From there, I went to Google Calendar and hit the plus sign by Other Calendars and chose from URL.  Then I paste in the URL and hit Add Calendar.  So this is all well and good in terms of being able to view the work calendar, but when I add an appointment in Outlook, it doesn't show up right away in Google Calendar.  In fact, I did some experiments and it takes 36 HOURS to add it.  36 HOURS.  Let's just say that this doesn't make for nimble planning -- and in fact, it makes me really anxious about missing appointments, so I found myself having to check both platforms anyway since they weren't automatically in sync.

Another idea I had is to simply add my personal gmail account as an invitee to each work calendar event.  Also, since I'm a mental health therapist, I have nothing but meetings all day long, so a calendar is a significant organizational tool.  I have several meetings per week scheduled by other people, but the vast majority of my appointments are sessions with clients that are scheduled into my calendar by me.  Adding my gmail address to each appointment is an extra step every time I create a new event.  I knew that eventually -- or maybe even frequently -- I will forget to do this.  So, here is what I decided to do instead.

I decided to keep my personal Google calendar as my main work calendar.  I have two different kinds of appointments.  For those I

• Schedule myself - I will simply create the event in my personal Google calendar.  The end!  For those
• Scheduled by someone else - I will accept them on Outlook and then forward them to my gmail address.  Forwarding the event serves to add me as an invited guest and I simply accept from my gmail account which will add it to my personal calendar.  This is better than duplicating the event, because now I will be updated as an invitee whenever there are changes to the appointment.

The last thing is that I keep that shared Outlook calendar turned on.  Remember?  The one that only updates every 36 hours?  I use this as an audit tool to make sure that I have all of the appointments scheduled by someone else on my personal Google calendar.  If one pops up and it doesn't have a duplicated Google Calendar event, then I know I have to go into Outlook and forward it to my gmail account.  That way, the 36 hour sync issue isn't as much of a problem since I'm just using it as an auditing tool.

This method works well for me, but if I had the reverse situation and had a lot more appointments scheduled by other people, I might decide to use Outlook as my main work calendar and simply invite my Google account as an attendee to any appointment that I was creating.  But as it is, I only look at my Outlook calendar to accept appointments and forward them to my gmail account -- otherwise, I use Google Calendar for both personal and work.

And that's it!  Let me know what you think.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!