Juggling Sheep
Welcome to Juggling Sheep, Jay Perry's blog about time management and personal productivity for pastors. Learn to balance work, life, family, and personal spirituality.

Share your best practices, tips and tricks, processes, sermon planning ideas, and resources. Feel free to email me: jaylperry[at]gmail[dot]com.

Monday, March 5, 2007

Palm Syncing with Google Calendar

I got a comment on my last post (about having to tweak my calendar so it's no longer a block schedule):
Josue said...

You may want to use Google Calendar. Then set a primary calendar for your hard appointments and a secondary one for your blocks. They can be given different colors and you can hide or highlight them very easily at any time.

GTD is cool :) I just started implementing it 2 weeks ago and it has changed my work flow in an amazing way!

1. Way to go, Josue! Keep using GTD. The first month may be the hardest. But if you focus on the amazing results you're seeing, you will never want to go back!

2. But I use a Palm Pilot. And in searching online, I've only seen nasty, ugly, roundabout hacks to get Google Calendars to sync with a Palm Pilot. Most of them involve iCal, which I don't use because I used to have Palm Pilot and iCal syncing issues.

...

So this evening, my wife and I were enjoying some idle conversation, when I wistfully proclaimed, "I wish there were some good way to sync my Palm Pilot with Google Calendars. I got this great comment today... And I can have multiple calendars with one as my block schedule and one as my appointment calendar..."

My wife said, "Did you even check your del.icio.us links today?!"

Lo and behold! There it was. A link from my lovely wife to goosync.com. And it looks like it actually will sync my Palm Pilot with Google Calendar! There's a free version and a subscription version. I'll have to see how well I like the free version before I go throwing money at anything.

I'll let you know what I come up with.

I'm not really tied to MSOutlook anyway, because I'm only a MSWindows person at work. And my work situation is changing... And I really doubt I'll ever have to use a PC again. Am I rambling?

P.S. Thanks for the tip, Josue! Thanks for the heads up, wife.

P.P.S. Did everyone else already know that you could sync Google Calendars with a Palm Pilot? Am I the last one to know these things?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't worry, you're not the only one who didn't know this. Me neither...
Though I really hesitate in tweaking my trusted system, one day I might try to switch from Outlook to the Google Calendar.

Felix Wonderland said...

You can try... I've tried a few products, and none of them really synced the way I wanted to. Also, I've only been able to find ONE product that actually will try to sync multiple calendars, and it's not free.

However, I wish you luck. And if you're only using your primary calendar, you should be fine.

GTD Wannabe said...

I've just discovered this myself (it's something I've wanted on and off for months). I'm trying out the free version (one calendar, limited window of days synced) and so far, I'm impressed. It was a bit of a pain to set up my Palm (i.e., needing third party software to let it talk to Goosync), but it's working. I'm just going to try it out for a couple of weeks before blogging about it myself ;)

Anonymous said...

I started using Airset and it does a lot of the same things. Syncs with Palm, Outlook, etc. It can read a google calendar but I don't think you can add to a google calendar from airset.

I have been pretty happy with it.

I wrote a little about it here: http://www.smartpastor.com/2007/01/airset.html

Anonymous said...

Can you tell me which Palm Pilot you have? Just curious, thanks.

Rachel said...

did you ever get a good free solution to this problem?