I like to think of myself as a reasonable person.  I try not to be too demanding, and while I like to keep up with the latest advances in technology I’m usually not right on the bleeding edge.  But the current gulf between my calendar organisational regime and where I want it to be makes me wonder whether my self-image is truly accurate.

I have my own concept of calendar nirvana.  I’ll attain it when I can:

• Create, update and check all of my work, personal and family appointment details at any time and location.  Even when I have no network access and am not in front of my main PC
• Be able to check all of my family’s appointments at any time (including those I’m not participating in)
• Have controlled access to schedules by third parties, so clients, colleagues and myself can arrange meetings at times that are mutually acceptable
• Have all of my calendars work together seamlessly without manual intervention

That doesn’t seem a lot to ask for, does it?  There are a lot of people out there who work and have families so I find it hard to believe I’m the only one who wants their calendars to work this way.

Unfortunately my current calendar regime is nowhere near nirvana.  I’m doing better than most but its still a mess:

• My work calendar (Lotus Notes) won’t share its information with any other application, service or device so its only accessible via my laptop or a web browser.
• My colleagues also use Lotus Notes so I can access their schedule details, but my clients use Outlook so I’m unable to view their availability.
• My personal calendar is in Google Calendar so my whole family can have access, but I rarely work directly in the web UI.  Of late I have been accepting invitations via GMail but in the past I’ve used Thunderbird and Lightning (with the Google Calendar provider) to manage this personal calendar.
• The combined work/personal calendar I use as my master calendar is kept in Outlook 2007, and is bi-directionally synchronised with my Treo.  I manually recreate work appointments in here at the same time I accept/create them in Lotus Notes.  I subscribe to my personal calendar in Outlook and manually copy entries from the Google Calendar subscription to my main calendar.
• The combined work/personal calendar is published a couple of different ways.  I’m publishing internet free/busy (.ifb) information to a personal website so selected clients can have visibility of my availability through Outlook.  I’ve tried a couple of approaches for publishing the content of my calendar for my family’s benefit but have yet to find anything completely satisfactory.
• My family publish their main calendars in Google Calendar.  The alternate between using the web UI and Thunderbird and Lightning (with the Google Calendar provider) to manage this.  Currently the latter approach is preferred because Google Calendar can’t subscribe to my combined work/personal calendar the way it is published today.
• I also subscribe to my family’s and children’s calendars in Outlook 2007 (read only).

As you can see there are a lot of technologies, manual steps and potential failure points in how my calendar is managed today.  There are also certain aspects of nirvana that I can’t emulate at all (e.g. subscribe to client availability information in Lotus Notes) and would prefer not to do (e.g. store details of work appointments in Google Calendar) but are essential to the way I share my data today.

How can I reach nirvana?  There is no easy answer right now but I’m determined to move closer to my vision of the future and take out the manual steps in my calendar management regime.  I’ll share the good, bad and indifferent steps I take along the way.  Hopefully they may be of use to you in the journey to reach your personal version of calendar nirvana.