This is the third in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series.

Calendars are one of the areas that most people seem to have pretty well under control.  Your inbox might be a mess, your task list consists of 27 post-it notes, and you have no idea where the photos from last year’s vacation ended up, but your calendar is up to date.  Even with that in mind, there are almost certainly ways to streamline your process.

As with most things, I’ll be recommending a free solution that Google provides — Google Calendar.  Living completely online, it has many of the same benefits as Gmail, such as not tying you to a particular computer and saving you from the worry of “what if my computer crashes?”.  It offers a few other advantages as well:

• Shared Calendars: Our family has four calendars, one for each of us.  They’re all merged into a single Google Calendar, and color-coded to tell them apart.
• Public Calendars: You can access useful public calendars to merge with your own.  Some of mine include “US Holidays” and the schedule for the Atlanta Falcons football team
• Mobile Access: You can have it sync with your iPhone, it works natively with Android phones (like the hot new Droid), and their mobile version works with almost any phone.

Here’s a quick look at how I use Google Calendar:

Google Calendar certainly isn’t the only game in town.  30 Boxes and Zoho Calendar are fine choices, and there are many others out there.  If you use something else (and love it), leave a comment and tell us about it.

As you can see, my calendar tends to stay pretty light.  My days are jam-packed, but it’s mostly doing work — building sites, writing blog posts, etc.  All of that stuff stays in my task list, which I covered in my “Organize your Tasks” post.  Finding the right balance between “what is a task” and “what goes on my calendar” can be tricky, so I’ll be sure to cover that next week.

For those of you with busier calendars, what other tips do you have?

This is the third in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series.

Organize Your Digital Life 3 – Calendar management is a post from: MickMel

Just about exactly a month ago, I went out and purchased an AT&T Microcell.  AT&T reception in our house is awful, and I’m not in a position to switch to Verizon.  Therefore, the Microcell seemed like a good choice.

If you’re familiar with the Microcell concept, it’s a small device that uses your internet connection and essentially creates a cell tower in your house.  I set it up in our office and now we have full 3G bars through the entire house!  My wife and I both have iPhones, and friends have used various other 3G phones.  They all work very well with the Microcell. You can read more about it on AT&T’s site.

Cost: $149 to buy the unit.  If you want, you can sign a contract for $14.95 month for an individual ($29.99 for a family plan) and minutes you use via the Microcell don’t count toward your monthly minute caps.  It’s a neat idea, but we’re always under our minutes anyhow so we didn’t do it.  $149 and we were out the door.

Installation: Simple, but buggy.  It’s not hard to set up, but you need to wait 90 minutes for it “configure itself”.  After a few hours it was still failing so I had to call AT&T.  There’s a GPS inside the Microcell so they can make sure you only use it from your house.  Somehow the coordinates they thought I should have didn’t match with the Microcell, so it would never connect.  Once they fixed it over the phone it worked great.

Adding Users: For a person to be able to use it, you need to add their number to the system.  It’s easy to add one, but you’re limited to 10.  I’d like to just add all of my AT&T friends and be done with it, so when they come over they’ll get full bars.  Sadly, I need to swap them out from time to time.  Seems pretty silly to have to do that.  The idea behind this is to prevent your neighbors from leeching your signal, which makes sense.  Still, why a limit of just 10?  Also, it’s worth mentioning that only four calls can be made simultaneously on the device.  I doubt that’ll ever be a problem for us.

Issues: AT&T brags about a seamless hand-off if you leave your house mid-call.  It’ll transfer your call from the Microcell to the nearest tower without a hiccup.  That may be true, but our data connection gets messed up whenever we leave the house.  It’s a few minutes (or a reboot) before data will work again.  Kind of a pain.

Bottom Line: If you have AT&T cell phones in your house and have bad reception, get a Microcell!  It’s a shame that you need one, but it does the job.  As a friend said: “You need to switch to Verizon. I don’t need anything special from them to get cell reception in my house.”  It’s true.  I hate that I had to pay AT&T $150 to fix their pathetic network, but now I get great reception with my phone and I’m happy I did it.

Review of the AT&T Microcell is a post from: MickMel

Look at that cute haircut!

Trying out the iPhone posting app is a post from: MickMel