Doodle & Google calendar

Well, this weeks things have been a success. I completed them both in under half an hour.

Doodle was easy to set up, the only thing I had forgotten was to enter my email address in order to get updates when someone filled my poll in but even that was easy to go back and change. The first poll I was sent had three options and an explanation for each: "red" for do not have time, "yellow" for could make time if necessay and "green" for have time. When I created my own doodle I could only find the two options of "red" and "green" so I'm not sure how to create the extra option. It's good to have a third option as yes or no can be restrictive.

Five of the Cam23 participants set up Doodle polls, although we based our meeting on the dates and times from the first one to send theirs out. A meeting was suggested at 2am on Saturday but unfortunately we were all busy so we met last Friday, although our meeting was less about Cam23 and more about gossip and eating biscuits. We really must take this more seriously.

I think Doodle would be useful for my library as every term we have to set up a rota from a pool of graduate students to do Saturday invigilation. We usually send them an email with the dates and they tell us which ones they can or can't do and the rota is established. Although this tends to be changed halfway through when they remember prior engagements they'd forgotten the first time round necessitating much swapping round of dates.

I loved Google calendar. It was simple to set up and add things to. When you enter a start time, the end times to choose from also state the duration (handy for seeing how long that meeting will really last). I forgot to specify "all day" when entering my week's leave, thus my holiday began at 8:30am on Monday and finished at 4:30pm on Friday (a very short holiday). The librarian and I thought about creating a calendar we could share between us. We presently have a paper one with a different meerkat for each month (including one that looks as though it's posing for Playboy) which we add to constantly and we can always see. Google calendar relies on both of us logging on to a) remember to add new events and b) remember to check it before booking a new event.