Farrah's Little Place in the Blogosphere

Last Thursday night I decided to get myself better managed since I’ve been feeling a bit behind since going back to work FT outside the home. I use Google Gmail for my blog and personal emails, Outlook Exchange for work and then I have my Blackberry (BB) that goes everywhere I go.

Between blogging here and The Book Faery Reviews, my personal appointments, family appointments, school assignments and work meetings, managing my time efficiently is absolutely essential. And the only way I can do this is to have all everything centralize and sync up into 1 main calendar. Being the electronic freak I am, of course I had to do this all electronically as to be honest, I lose calendars and pieces of paper.

As of last week my work outlook calendar and Google calendar were in two locations and my BB calendar had this and that and in some cases there were duplicates. This I found was not very efficient when managing time. Now I sync my work Outlook calendar/contacts with my Blackberry (but chose not to merge my personal life into my work calendar). My BB is then synced with my Google calendar online automatically with Google Sync so that my personal and work lives are merged into one both online and on my BB. THEN when I’m in front of my home laptop, the BB is connected to sync with Outlook. It seems like a lot of syncing but it takes merely a couple minutes if not less and allows me to access my calendar and make changes anywhere, anytime.

My life according to color…

You probably can’t see the details in my screen-shot above but here you can see multiple colors and those colors represent different types of events for quick scanning. Green represents The Book Faery Reviews, blue is work (yeah I know…seems my life revolves around The Book Faery Reviews and work!), red tells me a bill is due, turquoise tells me there is a birthday, etc. etc…

Not only do I sync my calendars up, I also sync my 5 Gmail accounts in Outlook and of course I have to have folders and rules created to make finding/reading emails easier…

I also have my Google RSS Feeds synced into Outlook. I’ve been so behind lately and I’m starting to get overwhelmed with emails so I’m going to start selecting only certain ones for email subscriptions and leaving all others to my RSS Feeder. Not only can I access my Google reader online and now in Outlook, I can also access it via my BB using the Google Mobile Apps. And BTW…yeah I’m THAT far behind in my Google Reader…thus the reason I needed to re-organize, re-sync, AND decide which feeds I wish to continue following as I go through them…

While I was re-organizing my life digitally I also decided it was time I backed things up since you never know when a computer may go on the fritz. When you have documents ranging from personal, school, work and blogging, losing files can be a horrible experience (believe me…starting over is NO FUN). I try to back up files (including my emails) on an external drive weekly or at least monthly. In a couple of weeks I have plans to upgrade my OS from Vista to Windows 7, upgrading my BB and getting an i-Pod touch (I just can’t wait for the i-Pad…) so doing all of this was imperative for when I do some transferring.

Tell me…how digitally organized are you?

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