I don’t know about you, but I use my Outlook calendar to remind me of any number of things, not just work meetings and deadlines. For example, if I have a dentist appointment scheduled during normal working hours, I’ll put an appointment reminder on my calendar for 4:00 PM the day before. That way, right before I leave it will remind me of that appointment the next day. However, I also use it for tasks that I need to do but that I tend to put off. I’ll set it up to remind me every X amount of hours so that I’m constantly bothered to get it done. This cuts down on my procrastination time, but that doesn’t mean it still doesn’t take me a while to get it done. A great example of this is an upcoming airline reservation I have.

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For those of us that use Outlook at work (which should be almost everybody by now), the Calendar is a pretty familiar tool.  Every time that we get a meeting invite, it is added to the calendar and we get an oh-so-necessary reminder right before the meeting starts.  I don’t know about you, but this has saved me many times from being late or missing a meeting entirely.

However, what most people don’t do and what we should do is use the Calendar even when we don’t have a formal meeting to go to.  How so?  Due dates, informal telecon’s and doctor’s appointments, these are all examples of things that can slip through the cracks at least for me when I’m busy multitasking like the good little cubicle drone that I am.