Calendaring - High Tech or Low Tech?

Technology Thursday

Calendaring vexes me. I'm a big fan of information technology and digitization of information.  My husband is also.  And yet neither of us have really found a calendaring solution we're happy with, much less one that lets us easily share our calendars with each other and keep a joint family/household calendar. Awhile back I stopped looking, because I figure if such a wonderful thing were to be created, I'd hear about it through some channel or another.

I know there are a few things that come close.

My current calendar is the default one in Outlook Exchange. I sync it with my Blackberry. I can share that calendar with my work colleagues. I don't want to keep two separate calendars, so personal stuff goes there too and I just have to mark all of that private.  It's far from ideal to have all of my calendar information at work, but I refuse to try to maintain two separate electronic calendars. If only I remembered to back it up more often.  Other things I've looked at are iCal on the Macintosh and the Google calendar application. I'm sure there are other possibilities out there.

For now, however, my husband and I keep track of the household schedule in a very low-tech fashion. We print daily ToDo lists on sheets of paper--we're still trying to sort out the childcare routine and things keep changing, so a checklist helps--and leave them on the dining table. And we have a calendar with large squares for each date hanging in the kitchen on which we scribble household stuff.  We also email each other the details of our individual schedules that the other needs to be aware of. 

It's a cobbled-together solution that, given good tools and technology, could be managed much more smoothly.  But it works for us for now. 

What scheduling or calendaring solutions do you use to manage a busy household?

Comments

[Katherine]

I use Yahoo's calendar because many of my calendar items begin in yahoo groups. But my husband uses outlook at work so we have to talk through the calendars to synchronize. The good thing about this is it forces us to coordinate and make joint decisions about upcoming events. The bad thing ... it takes a lot of time! Your paper solution is sounding pretty good.