Your thoughts on calendars and organizers

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fiksal
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Your thoughts on calendars and organizers

Post by fiksal » Mon, 13. Jan 20, 20:14

Howdy,

I am curious what are you folks are comfortable with, when it comes to online / cloud apps for Calendar, Tasks, Reminders, Notes, etc?

If you even use them of course.

I am constantly looking for tools that do the job better, and unfortunately for Apple fans, I am not looking for Apple tools. (Unless they are cross platform, of course)


Here's my approach, that I am hoping to reduce a little

- Google Keep - good for storing To Do tasks, as there's a widget that displays them rather well
I also use it for all other notes and visual / image notes for anything interesting. Unfortunately while it does display things quickly it's performance is quite bad on a phone.

- Google Calendar - my go to tool for putting anything with a date, time and duration. I also like that it does multiple calendars.
Started using their "Reminder" feature for quick to-do-s.

- "Business Calendar" android app - a much better view of the calendar than Google's.

- Google Drive - for when Google Keep is too little

- Microsoft's OneNote - just started testing it. I like that it can mix lots of various content. It can work something in between notes and bookmarks. The widget support is lacking. Can it replace Google Keep? We will see.

- Trello - considered it for To Do notes, but found it too much for that purpose.

- an actual physical notebook. Yes, I use them as well. A couple of stationary notebooks placed in key locations around key desks. Comes with a pen. Only a black pen that has more ink than the rest, but doesnt smear.
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Re: Your thoughts on calendars and organizers

Post by Alan Phipps » Mon, 13. Jan 20, 20:57

I have a daily organiser, diary, calendar and social manager app all rolled into one; it's called the wife. It's very, very unforgiving of mistakes and omissions. :D
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Re: Your thoughts on calendars and organizers

Post by Vertigo 7 » Mon, 13. Jan 20, 21:06

outlook and any MS exchange email provider (including hotmail/outlook.com/etc.). Most smart phones will have an exchange client built into their default email app as well so multi-platform isn't an issue and Outlook is available for OSX as well. Or you can get the outlook app for free for smart phones.

The related key benefits are:

You can have more than one calendar setup for the account. So like work related things in one, holidays in one, birthdays in another... however you wanna do it and can easily toggle them off/on at will and set reminders at will.
Creating/modifying/removing events from one device will pretty well simultaneously remove it from any other.
Notes/To do lists/tasks can be synced as well.

Then, of course, there's the whole email and contacts management thing. It's a pretty well complete package.

I use Outlook for both work and personal use and I can't say anything else quite compares to the simplicity and security offered with that and MS Exchange. Google tries with their sync app but it's hit or miss at times and, well, Google's crap has always looked and felt like it was designed by a junior high intro to computer science class.
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Re: Your thoughts on calendars and organizers

Post by fiksal » Mon, 13. Jan 20, 21:22

Alan Phipps wrote:
Mon, 13. Jan 20, 20:57
I have a daily organiser, diary, calendar and social manager app all rolled into one; it's called the wife. It's very, very unforgiving of mistakes and omissions. :D
Not gonna work, I am already told I have short memory for not work related things.

Vertigo 7 wrote:
Mon, 13. Jan 20, 21:06
I use Outlook for both work and personal use and I can't say anything else quite compares to the simplicity and security offered with that and MS Exchange.

Really, you like MS?

It always striked me as heavy and complicated. There's more than one Outlook right, one is free and one isnt?

I can play around with it



You arent wrong with Google's UI quality.
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Re: Your thoughts on calendars and organizers

Post by red assassin » Mon, 13. Jan 20, 22:13

I use Google Calendar at home and a mixture of Outlook and OneNote at work. (Outlook is for meetings and my general todo list, OneNote is for todo lists for specific projects, alongside the assorted other notes I keep on the things I'm working on. OneNote is probably my favourite productivity application ever. I would use it more at home if there was a Linux version/a less janky browser version.)
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Re: Your thoughts on calendars and organizers

Post by fiksal » Tue, 14. Jan 20, 00:08

red assassin wrote:
Mon, 13. Jan 20, 22:13
OneNote is probably my favourite productivity application ever.
do you use more the Notebook part of it or Sticky? Or both?
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Re: Your thoughts on calendars and organizers

Post by red assassin » Tue, 14. Jan 20, 00:58

I have literally never used the sticky notes feature in my life, I just use the notebook.
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Re: Your thoughts on calendars and organizers

Post by pjknibbs » Tue, 14. Jan 20, 08:05

fiksal wrote:
Mon, 13. Jan 20, 21:22
It always striked me as heavy and complicated. There's more than one Outlook right, one is free and one isnt?
Not really. There used to be a free version called Outlook Express but it literally just did e-mail and had no calendar functionality. The "proper" version of Outlook has always been a paid app, AFAIK.

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Re: Your thoughts on calendars and organizers

Post by CBJ » Tue, 14. Jan 20, 11:05

Either I'm getting old, or you guys have much more complicated lives than me. I still use this "app".

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Re: Your thoughts on calendars and organizers

Post by Vertigo 7 » Tue, 14. Jan 20, 15:20

The thing about exchange that makes it so preferable to me is the data (email, contacts, calendars, etc.) lives on the mail server. Exchange uses an active session and you're seeing the data as it is on the server and manipulating it directly instead of buffering it in the client and waiting for a copy to be sent to the mail server with traditional pop/smtp/imap mail clients.

pop and smtp only deal with email, imap can make use of calendar functions, but only exchange offers the full "organizing" suite.

But yeah, I do like Outlook very much. It's gone through many iterations since it was a bit cumbersome back in the day. Exchange was also in its infancy then. It wasn't until 3 or 4 years ago that MS began offering full exchange availability through hotmail and such, where that had only lived in the corporate enterprise before. Since moving to offering Office 365 to businesses and consumers alike, they've consolidated all of their consumer and enterprise facing technologies to utilize the same platform.

Anywho, it's a fairly seamless experience and has really simplified things for me to manage all of my crap. I have both my work and personal accounts in a single mail client (outlook) and maintain separate calendars and contacts for each. It's all synced to my cell and it's nothing for me to transition to another machine or even access the accounts through MS's website to manage it all there as well.
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Re: Your thoughts on calendars and organizers

Post by red assassin » Wed, 15. Jan 20, 00:25

Vertigo 7 wrote:
Tue, 14. Jan 20, 15:20
The thing about exchange that makes it so preferable to me is the data (email, contacts, calendars, etc.) lives on the mail server. Exchange uses an active session and you're seeing the data as it is on the server and manipulating it directly instead of buffering it in the client and waiting for a copy to be sent to the mail server with traditional pop/smtp/imap mail clients.
I wish their implementation did support just a little bit of client-side buffering, though. Exchange server lagging out a bit? Hope you didn't want to click any buttons in Outlook until it settles down! Switched views in Outlook? Sit tight while we re-request all the data we had five seconds ago and then painfully redraw it all!
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Re: Your thoughts on calendars and organizers

Post by Vertigo 7 » Wed, 15. Jan 20, 15:09

red assassin wrote:
Wed, 15. Jan 20, 00:25
Vertigo 7 wrote:
Tue, 14. Jan 20, 15:20
The thing about exchange that makes it so preferable to me is the data (email, contacts, calendars, etc.) lives on the mail server. Exchange uses an active session and you're seeing the data as it is on the server and manipulating it directly instead of buffering it in the client and waiting for a copy to be sent to the mail server with traditional pop/smtp/imap mail clients.
I wish their implementation did support just a little bit of client-side buffering, though. Exchange server lagging out a bit? Hope you didn't want to click any buttons in Outlook until it settles down! Switched views in Outlook? Sit tight while we re-request all the data we had five seconds ago and then painfully redraw it all!
Well, technically it does. Your mailbox is cached locally so you can still work with your stuff offline and changes will be pushed to the server when reconnected. I haven't experienced any kind of lag with exchange in recent memory. Worst thing that I've had happen was issues logging back into the mail server when the email admins made a change to the environment or my mailbox while my session was active. But that was when we were hosting exchange ourselves. Haven't had any issues with O365.
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Re: Your thoughts on calendars and organizers

Post by pjknibbs » Wed, 15. Jan 20, 16:36

Vertigo 7 wrote:
Wed, 15. Jan 20, 15:09
Well, technically it does. Your mailbox is cached locally so you can still work with your stuff offline
I think that's a setting that you can turn on or off when you configure the Exchange account in Outlook in the first place.

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Re: Your thoughts on calendars and organizers

Post by fiksal » Wed, 15. Jan 20, 16:45

I am giving oneNote more of a try now. It does have interesting things going on.


As for Exchange, that one is a bit hard for me to switch to, plus I'd need to buy it.

CBJ wrote:
Tue, 14. Jan 20, 11:05
Either I'm getting old, or you guys have much more complicated lives than me. I still use this "app".
Actually, I think this is way harder

I tried using physical notebook only, and it became a bit complex. I had multiple events written over multiple days, crossed over, moved, and moved again.
Multiple to - do things that I try to order in something sensible, among the 'completed' and crossed out to do -s. I just became way too many pages.

I dont have that skill
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Re: Your thoughts on calendars and organizers

Post by red assassin » Wed, 15. Jan 20, 19:49

Vertigo 7 wrote:
Wed, 15. Jan 20, 15:09
Well, technically it does. Your mailbox is cached locally so you can still work with your stuff offline and changes will be pushed to the server when reconnected. I haven't experienced any kind of lag with exchange in recent memory. Worst thing that I've had happen was issues logging back into the mail server when the email admins made a change to the environment or my mailbox while my session was active. But that was when we were hosting exchange ourselves. Haven't had any issues with O365.
To be fair this is on a locally hosted Exchange, I haven't had any issues with the O365 one.
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Re: Your thoughts on calendars and organizers

Post by Ketraar » Fri, 17. Jan 20, 12:27

I use Google Canlendar. Being part of several organizations its great since I can sync all calendars of each institution both on PC and phone.
Its also great since we use it to set up meetings and the invitation email has a "yes, maybe, no" function that will add the date to the calendar automatically.

The notification, both via email and sound on phone, and the phone app that tracks all upcoming events makes life much easier to keep track of various "tasks/meetings". I even use it for small stuff that I just need to remind.

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Re: Your thoughts on calendars and organizers

Post by fiksal » Mon, 20. Jan 20, 05:15

I've been test driving One Note for a few days now, and I am digging its flexibly layout functionality. Getting away from a vertical style note taking of Word Doc -like programs is a nice change, that I was looking for.

I see some minuses however, for example, there's no "archive" option and deletes are permanent. I dont see tagging, though I suppose those could be sort of done via manually entering text.


How's the performance on it? On PCs? On phones? I am switching from Keep because of its abysmal performance on (my older) Android
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Re: Your thoughts on calendars and organizers

Post by red assassin » Mon, 20. Jan 20, 10:17

You can create a new notebook, or a new section in your current one, and drop stuff into that as an archive - that's what I do.

I find the search is pretty good, so I've never needed specific tagging.

I've never had performance problems in Windows or Mac OS. I don't use it on mobile, though.
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Re: Your thoughts on calendars and organizers

Post by fiksal » Mon, 20. Jan 20, 21:15

yep, that's what I'll do as well.


do you use OneNote for bookmarks too, or not so much?
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Re: Your thoughts on calendars and organizers

Post by red assassin » Mon, 20. Jan 20, 21:40

Sort of. I've never thought of it as specifically a tool for keeping bookmarks, but my notes on any given thing will definitely include a bunch of links to relevant stuff. I also occasionally use it to keep notes on how to do something I'm likely to forget before I have to do it next, which at its simplest might just be a link and a line or two of explanation.
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