What I'd Like to See: Calendar Widget on Gmail
Gmail is an e-lifeline for me. It’s typically the first thing I open up when I go online, and it serves as the main channel in which I not only communicate with the world, but it’s also the place where I store an enormous amount of information and organize my online life.
One of my ongoing challenges is to stay organized on the multiple fronts that make up a modern online media cultist’s life. I’ve experimented with a bunch of calendar applications, but still haven’t found anything that has worked for me. Partly out of desperation, I’m giving Google Calendar one last go. I’m hoping that its e-mail alerts will give me help me to have some hope of keeping up with things (remembering people’s birthdays: the bane of my existence!).
I’d really love to see an embeddable widget within Gmail that would let me scroll through events in my calendar. I kind of envision the interface to work something like meevee’s television widget, allowing you to scroll up and down through upcoming events. If we wanted to get fancy about it, it would be really cool to have a widget with different tabs that could be related to channels or tags. So I could set it up that I could have a “birthdays” tab on the calendar widget that let me scroll through only birthdays that I had entered, or “deadlines” or “essential TV shows” (Sopranos! The Shield! Lost!) and so on.
By the way, one application that has been a really pleasant surprise in how much it’s helped me keep tracked and organized is Joe’s Goals, which is a simple, easy, and kind of fun way to track progress and goals day-to-day. Thanks to the great Lifehacker for the tip on that.
