Web Worker Daily

In today’s world of home-based businesses, geographically dispersed business operations, outsourced services and worldwide marketing activities, scheduling meetings can become a bit of a nightmare. It’s also a world of many calendar programs (Outlook, MS Exchange, Google Calendar, LotusLive (Notes), iCal and Entourage) and diverse platforms (Windows, Mac, smartphones). Scheduling a meeting by email exchange can be a tedious and lengthy process at the best of times. Launching today, Tungle aims to make meeting scheduling a much simpler process for all parties.

Initially released two years ago as an Outlook plug-in, the Tungle team used the alpha and beta versions of the platform as a market research tool, as much as a test of the platform itself. Key findings included:

• it takes too many emails/phone calls to coordinate one meeting
• participants are dispersed around the globe and across different time zones
• 60% of meetings are with participants from outside the meeting coordinator’s company
• 75% of meetings are one-to-one
• 95% of meetings have four or fewer participants

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I love my Google Calendar, but I also like the physical experience of planning my days, weeks, and months using a paper calendar or planner. Here are three possibilities for when you want to manage your life with pen and paper instead of using an online calendar.

Doodle while you plan

With a pack of multi-colored gel pens and this 8 Days-A-Week Doodle Planner available from See Jane Work, you’ll be all ready to doodle your plans and dreams each week as you plan out your days. “8 days a week” means it shows Monday through Sunday plus Someday, so you have room to write things you want to get done as you have a spare moment. The Doodle part of it means you get blank pages interspersed with the weekly schedules to draw pictures, do a mind map of your week, or take random notes.

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