I’ve been using Google Calendar to various degrees since its inception. I feel like I’ve finally gotten to a place where it works truly for me, but it took some doing. I’m going to share best practices that I’ve found – and also how I’m using it to enhance my web development with Joomla now too!

First of all, let’s itemize the things I need to organize with the calendar:

• Personal Meetings and placeholder times – reminding myself that the wife and I have a date scheduled so that I don’t schedule over it
• Church Events
• Masonic Lodge Events
• Republican Events
• Birthdays & Anniversaries
• Monthly Bill Due Dates
• Holidays
• Work Events

So, this is where the ability to have multiple calendars in one comes in handy, and where you’re ultimately going to maintain your sanity. When you look at my calendar with all of the individual calendars selected and visible, it looks like I never have a free moment – but being able to filter out things like Birthdays, Holidays, the church calendar of events, and I see the real deal.

I established the UMT calendar online through our Google Apps, so I can turn ALL church events on and off. I am running the Masonic Lodge website, so I have separated it out and made it public. Birthdays & Anniversaries don’t affect my scheduling, so they need to be able to be turned off to avoid visual clutter. All in all, I have 9 calendars active right now, but I see everything I need to see.

I highly suggest taking the time to set up and color code your individual calendars. Take the time to identify the different pulls on your time and give them their own calendar.

Also, did you know about the gCalendar component for Joomla? Now you can integrate your Google calendar into your Joomla site instead of managing two calendars!