Any business with more than one employee, and more than one resource to share, will benefit from some sort of scheduling method. Although not much is wrong with old fashioned pen and paper, it is definitely easier to schedule resources from anywhere in the world, and have the information available from any other computer as well.

If you have a projector, a meeting room, or even a car that needs to be shared, you can use Google Calendar to schedule every particular resource.
Basically, each resource will be given its own calendar and shared with all interested parties.

To set this up, first you need a Google Account (this is the same as your Gmail account). Then, you need to make sure the Calendar you are creating will be set to
“Auto-accept invitations”.

How to set to Auto-accept

1. Create a calendar in Google calendar dedicate to your resource, for example ‘meeting room 1′
2. On the left of the screen there is a calendar list, select ‘meeting room 1′ calendar and then select ‘calendar settings’
3. Select the ‘calendar details’ tab
4. Enable “Auto-accept invitations” by selecting “Auto-accept invitations that do not conflict.”
5. Click “Save.”

How to Share your Resource Calendar

1. Click on the down-arrow next to the calendar you created and select “Share this calendar.”
2. The calendar is shared by email, so enter the email addresses of the users that will be sharing access to meeting room 1.
3. Select the level of shared permission. This has to be set to “see all event details” or higher.
4. Last step: click “save”

This doesn’t only work on the business front, but also at home. Imagine, if you have two kids who have to share a car. Avoid or eliminate the constant conflict between the two by having a car-schedule, where each one can reserve a time slot to use this resource.

If you are already syncing your Google Calendar with either iCal, or your Blackberry, you will always have access to the most up to date resource schedule.

Managing a large project, or scheduling multiple projects, can be more challenging than it needs to be with a traditional calendar. When you are in a meeting, being able to quickly map out a time frame within which a project needs to be completed, and perhaps delegate who will tackle it, can really move things forward.

Although not a substitute for your regular calendar system, Compact Calendar provides you with a spreadsheet that can easily be printed out and used as a global overview. Time is shown in ‘blocks’. You can easily block off a period for a particular project, and add notes in the side-lines.

The major advantage of Compact Cal is that time is shown horizontally, and ‘distance’ on the calendar equals time directly. Traditional calendars show time divided into months, or weeks, which makes it more difficult to have a clear overview of time on a continuous basis. When dealing with projects that span multiple months, this can be a great tool to doodle out progress and time lines.

You can download a Canadian version of CompactCal, or the US version directly. For other international versions, see the official Compact Cal website.

Your business isn’t a schoolyard, so scheduling regular breaks and forcing employees to be physically active is not a solution. However, WorkRave automatically shows regular alerts that tell you to take micro-breaks. During these micro-breaks you can move around, or do a few exercises that pop up on the screen. These are designed to prevent, and treat, repetitive stress injuries often caused by computer use.

Downsides to WorkRave

WorkRave does not work on Mac computers, but it does have a separate Linux and Windows version.

Benefits of WorkRave

Although breaks are regularly scheduled to show up on your screen, you have the possibility of ‘postponing’ a break if you happen to be on a role or hit a creative moment. However, the program does keep track of the total amount of ‘break time’ you’ve taken, and holds you to your target for the day. Continuously postponing breaks therefore doesn’t mean they are getting skipped altogether!

How WorkRave Helps Your Business

Fast-paced environments and productivity goals can help employees forget to take short breaks during the day. Instead of getting up and walking around a few minutes, people tend to stay glued to their computer screens. Depending on the set-up of your business, this behavior might unintentionally be encouraged.

Without regular breaks, employee morale starts to suffer. Aside from this relatively ‘fixable’ problem, repetitive strain disorders can develop, such as carpel tunnel.
Employees in pain don’t tend to be productive employees, and cost businesses millions of dollars a year. Aside from the obvious price tag attached to job-related injuries, it’s a great idea to foster a healthy work environment, and WorkRave will effortlessly help you achieve just this.

Have you had employees with repetitive strain injuries? How is your work environment set up to prevent this from happening, and to encourage a healthy balance of work and break-time?

Promoting your business online is one of the best things you can do for yourself. However, even in this day and age, not all businesses have a website. In some cases, the business consists of just one service provider, and keeping up with a website does not seem feasible. Most of the time, technical difficulties also play a role.

Certain businesses need a website more than others. A real estate agent cannot promote her listings very well without one, but a new designer is probably more interested in networking with her local store owners than building an online global presence. Especially if she is on her own, and can’t handle more than a certain level of demand anyways. The cost of having and maintaining a website then doesn’t make much sense, but it doesn’t mean she would not benefit from an online presence.

Whichever your reason for not having a website (yet), here are two ways you can promote your business online without one.

Social Networking

Chances are you have a profile on Facebook. If not, then perhaps you are connected to some other social networking site. If you haven’t, set up a profile and start posting regular updates about your business. Friends, family, and friends-of-friends will start finding out about your progress. You never know who they know, and who might need your services.

Blog Networks

Online publishing networks like Hubpages offer a great platform for anyone to publish about anything. You don’t need to worry about designing and maintaining your own blog, and the benefit is that – unlike with your own blog – you have instant readership. So your message will automatically be seen by many more people, immediately. Hubpages is particularly useful for creative types, such a writers, who want to build a portfolio. But it is incredibly useful for professionals trying to position themselves as an expert in their industry. By offering some of their expertise to a community, they also automatically promote their own services. Added benefit of Hubpages: you get a royalty payment based on the popularity of your articles. For some, this can grow to a steady part-time income.

Creating a Brand

Promoting yourself, and your business, is all about creating a brand. You need to keep in mind what your brand is in order for you to communicate it properly when promoting yourself. If you keep up with it though, you will start seeing the results of your efforts over time.

Need help branding your services properly? Contact me for some no-obligation information.

Sometimes keeping things simple is the easiest way to ensure you don’t miss your appointments or lose all your data to a technical screw-up. The most basic way to keep a calendar would still be the good-old-fashioned pen and paper approach. This comes at a price though: not just the minor cost of purchasing a new calendar each year, but mostly the cost to your back from carrying it around every day.

A more back-friendly option is a digital calendar, and virtually any computer, phone or PDA you buy comes with such a device built in. The problem is that you need to either decide which of these devices to use as your calendar, or find ways to sync the same calendar onto different gadgets.

Keeping an online calendar

If you keep a copy of your calendar online, the obvious benefit is that you can access it from any computer, anywhere in the world. For those who commute to different offices or locations for work, or have off-site meetings and are generally not always carrying their laptops with them, this is a nice back-up option.

Similarly, if you sometimes find yourself without your laptop but need to add a quick appointment to your calendar, online storage is an easy solution. One simple but versatile system is Google Calendar. However, when keeping track of your daily appointments through different calendars, how do we get them to sync up with each other so you are not referencing three different sources all the time?

Syncing Google Calendar with iCal

It’s extremely easy to sync your google calendar with iCal (for Mac users), but it is only a one-way sync from google calendar, to iCal (not the other way around).

The only way this is useful is if you want to use Google Calendar to simply add appointments to your iCal, and not actually use it to reference all your calendar data. If you would like a mirror of your iCal information to be available in Google Calendar, then you need a two-way sync.

Two-Way Sync with GCalDaemon

If you are the experimental type, then the command line, cross-platform, beta-release application called GCalDaemon will get your blood flowing. Like any good open source application, the secret to setting it up lies in being comfortable editing the text configuration file. Lifehacker has a great description of this trick here.

Keep in mind GCalDaemon is compatible with both Mac and Windows, and can sync your calendars across multiple applications such as: Lightning, iCal or Rainlendar

Two-Way sync with Spanning Sync

Easier for the non-programmer than GCalDaemon is Spanning Sync. Spanning Sync does charge a subscription (or one time purchase) fee, but if you refer a friend you receive $5, and your friend receives a $5 discount. This can add up to a free subscription, or even some spare cash. There is a free 15 day trial version of the program, and you can subscribe for $25 per year, or pay $65 once for lifetime use.

Two-way sync with BusySync

Cheaper than Spanning Sync, BusySync offers two-way synchronization between Google Calendars and your iCal, as well as calendar sharing through a LAN connection (think: sharing your calendar with your assistant/secretary or between family or coworkers). It comes with a $25 price tag, and has a free 30 day trial.

Syncing your calendar to a mobile device

If you want to sync your Google Calendar to your mobile phone or PDA, then GooSync is your program. The supported devices are nicely listed, and pictured, here. Not surprisingly, the iPhone is among the supported cell phones for GooSync. There is a free version of the program, as well as a paid version to get more features, like the ability to sync your task/to-do lists.

To choose which option suits your needs best, consider whether you are using a Mac or a PC, and whether this means you are already automatically syncing your calendars with some device or another: some phone software allows you to sync information kept in outlook, while iCal can sync with any iPod you may already carry with you anyways. When it comes to inputting extra information, the iPod sync is not very useful, it only serves as a reference of what is already added to your iCal.

Ultimately, you would likely benefit from a Google Calendar to computer sync, as well as a sync between your computer and mobile device (cell phone or PDA). If you use your computer as a ‘master file’ of all your appointments and day to day activities, and sync these to both Google Calendar and your mobile gadget, then you can be sure you will always carry the most recent copy of your calendar with you, no matter where you are!