Mind the Time: Apps for Managing a Busy Schedule

Web-based telephony, desktop video conferencing, and other digital tools make it easy to connect with people in real time. Virtual meetings have become standard fare, and the once arcane task of calculating time zones is now regularly performed in classrooms, where students and teachers collaborate with distant peers or welcome guest experts from around the globe. (For more on how this is done, see “You Are There,” pp. 46–48.) It’s a delicious irony that the Web, which threatens to consume our every waking moment with these amazing opportunities, also provides us with some amazing time-management tools to organize them.

www.timeanddate.com

Once you discover the resources at timeanddate.com, you’ll wonder how you ever calculated international time without it. In addition to simply finding out what time it is somewhere else in the world, you can configure your own personal world clock to track specific time zones. If you know the time of an event and you want anyone anywhere to be able to see that time translated into their own local time, use the site’s “Fixed Time World Clock” feature. Looking to chat up international colleagues—at a time when you’d all be awake? Use the “MeetingPlanner.”

www.google.com/calendar

In its quest for world domination, Google Calendar just got a step closer. This amazing program now allows you to create multiple calendars and select which one you see at any given time. Share a calendar with others who can update it as well. You can publish your calendar online in a variety of formats—so adding an event date and description to a Web site is as simple as adding it in your personal view. In my favorite feature, Google Calendar can be configured to send you an email or text message prior to the start of any calendar item (you can customize the amount of warning time).

www.doodle.com

Doodle makes easy work of scheduling events with multiple people. There are other free meeting planners, but Doodle is by far the quickest and most intuitive to use, with no registration required. Time zone conversions occur automatically, and you can even schedule meetings from your mobile device. If you do register for an account (it’s free), you can sync your confirmed events with your Google Calendar automatically. It even works for scheduling office hours, so if someone chooses a time you have available, other respondents will no longer see that time as open.