My use and slight obsession with Google Calendar has recently exploded. It all started out when I realized I could just make a calendar of San Francisco’s free museum days so I could stop missing out. Well, if a calendar for that, why not a calendar for everything else I need to remember.

I think like most people (right? back me up here, guys) I’ve always had one official CALENDAR for important things like doctor’s appointments and play dates and birthdays. Everything else in my life — dinner planning, shopping lists, topics to write about — ended up in separate scrawled lists or in texts to myself. Whatever system I came up with would eventually fail because, really, it was just too scattered and disorganized and was I really going to search back through texts to see what I wrote down 2 days ago?

Did you know that you can create as many calendars in your Google Calendar as you’d like? Now, I’ve got a calendar for Bean’s school (master school schedule, photo days, field trips, reminders to bring something in), a calendar of fun kid activities going on in the city (in addition to free museum days), and a calendar of planned Far Out City topics (useful for articles that require days of prep beforehand).

From there, I jumped into meal planning, so if I see a cool recipe, I can “schedule” it in for next Thursday and include a link to the recipe in my event details.

My Google Calendar has turned into a technicolor show of things to do, places to be, and things to remember.

The key is that my phone is synced to Google Calendar, so every morning, I wake up to notifications letting me know: what’s going on at school today, what I’m making for dinner tonight, what I’m writing about on this site, and what free kids events might be going on in the city (for after school).

It feels revolutionary, even though the effort put in is pretty minor.

Are you also a Google Calendar obsessive? What methods have you figured out for keeping all of life’s details organized?

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