Managing all your daily tasks is often difficult: you might have a lot of appointments with customers or clients, a long “to-do” list of activities to complete, or tight deadlines. In our schedules, there are often a lot of these tasks and every day we add more. If we forget even one of them, we run the the risk of bad consequences such making a bad impression on our customers or late payment penalties.
In this article, I want to share with you just one solution I have chosen to help you manage and keep on top of all your daily activities. My solution will provide you with many significant benefits. Read on and I will explain everything in this short guide!
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The solution: a cloud-based calendar
The solution I have chosen to help you manage your day more efficiently is a cloud-based agenda that allows you to create and manage appointments, organise reminders received from different devices such as iPhones and also to share these appointments with different users.
The product I have chosen to manage this agenda is Google Calendar: it is a tool which is easy, flexible, free, and suitable for everyone.
To show you the different purposes and benefits, I will tell you about some real examples from our daily work.
To manage deadlines and tasks, even recurring ones.
In our business life as accountants, we have a lot of daily deadlines to meet, for example, recurrent tax deadlines. I note these on a dedicated timetable and this ensures I complete all the tasks required to meet the deadlines and so avoid penalties for missed payments. Thanks to this method, we can accurately plan our cashflow in advance.
The calendar is also useful as it reminds us of recurring tasks, for example, weekly back-ups of our PC data.
I can choose different colours for differents kinds of tasks and this is especially useful in order to distinguish personal from professional tasks.
Checking my agenda everywhere
Yesterday was Sunday, and while I was in the garden with my daughter, a client phoned me to arrange an appointment. I immediately checked my availability on my smartphone and we agreed on the best day and time for our meeting. I then created an appointment on my smartphone. This meant that when I got into the office today, I could see the appointment on my office agenda.
Every appointment in Google Calendar is also saved on the cloud and so they are visible, clear and manageable from any device, including computers, smartphones, and tablets. I have the benefit of always having my agenda synchronised, without having to copy tasks onto different devices..
Receiving a reminder at the right moment
To organise better your tasks is important but it’s not enough if we don’t remember them at the right moment! Fortunately, for every appointment, I can link a reminder which will be displayed on every device. I can also request an email notification.
I can set the best time for my notification, from several minutes to several days before the event.
I can also add a reminder of the various documents required for the meeting in question. .
It’s possible to notify the appointment to someone else by email. After all this, I can be sure we will never forget any appointment ever again!
Moving appointments on my agenda easily
Almost every month, a client calls me to make an appointment that he or she often later forgets about. So postponing appointments is a regular task! Fortunately, all you need to do is to drag the appointment to a new day and this updates my agenda. This means I don’t have to re-insert the same information every time.
Finding an appointment again in my agenda
Do you ever have in your mind something you must do but you don’t remember when you have to do it? For example, yesterday I remember I had to pay the bill of my software consultant. Fortunately, with the “find” command on my agenda (similar to “search”), I could find all the information about his payment exactly when I needed it..
Be tidy to be more productive
Since using my cloud-based agenda for managing my tasks, I have been able to easily plan my daily activities and check the time I spend on completing every activity. This is very useful for the everyday management of my workload and also to be able to see all my upcoming tasks, using the daily, weekly and monthly agenda views.
So, using a new technological tool has given me clear benefits:
I save time and energy to be more efficient and to focus on my core business!
And you, what do you think about it?
This is my positive experience of an innovative tool that has enhanced my way of working.
Now it’s your turn: tell us how you manage your tasks and if you have a cloud-based agenda. What is your experience?