You don’t have to be Mr. Short Term Memory to need a reminder from time to time. (I would appreciate it if those of you who know me personally would refrain from making any jokes right now.) Two things that machines are good at are handling repetitive tasks that humans find mind-numbingly boring after awhile and laying in wait until a specified time before they take action. These 2 things are what make an online calendar ideally suited for reminding you–via email, instant message, or txt message–that it’s time for you to complete a task related to your professional life.
Every academic year (again and again and again and…), you’ll need to complete such tasks as these:
- Submit a proposal for a presentation at the major conference(s) in your field, and
- Submit an application for travel funding from your department and/or school, and
- Renew your memberships in the professional organizations to which you belong, and
- Compile your annual review materials and submit them for review, and…
Well, you get the picture.
At the beginning of each semester, before the chaos takes hold, put all of these deadlines into your calendar. And if you keep an online calendar, you should set up automated reminders so that you get an alert in advance of the deadline at intervals that make sense to you: 1 month out, 3 weeks out, 2 weeks out, 1 week out. Whatever you like.
Of course, this isn’t the only thing you need to do to to keep up with your regularly repeating tasks. It’s also a good idea to do a weekly review of all of your tasks and survey the weeks ahead in your schedule to make sure you’re doing what you need to do. But these reminders are certainly a useful and easy-to-establish way to get a machine to do some of your remembering for you.
If you have your own methods for making sure you remember to do your regularly repeating tasks, please let us hear about them in the comments. And if you’d like to add to the list of regularly repeating tasks a typical academic should remember to complete, feel free to share them below.
[Image by flickr user ppdigital (Creative Commons licensed).]
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4 Responses to Preparing for a new semester: hit your deadlines, with help from your calendar
Karen Hellekson - August 26, 2009 at 7:41 am
I use Google’s Calendar for remembering this kind of thing. I have a special calendar for Annual Events, and I have it squirt out e-mails at various levels of advance, as you suggest. My calendar will also remind me of certain important dates; those of you who advise students may want to remember such things as the last day of add-drop, or the last day to switch into a class. I always take the academic calendar and input important dates (FINALS YEAH!).
The organizations I belong to all send renewals via e-mail and I’m able to use PayPal, so I don’t log those in; I just wait for the note. My professional organizations are particularly good at this; my academic-professional ones, not so much. One just switched to online this last year (er, thanks to me pushing for that and doing some volunteer work to help make it happen). I’d say getting organizations to move to online application and payment, with automated renewal, ought to be a priority for them.
George H. Williams - August 26, 2009 at 8:04 am
+1 to your point about getting more academic organizations to move to an online (and automated) system for memberships and dues payments!
and
+1 to your suggestion to input important dates from the campus academic calendar. Now if only more campuses would make these dates importable to online calendars by publishing them in some kind of standard format… (or at least making them available as a file with comma-separated values!).
Kathy - August 31, 2009 at 9:21 pm
As someone who was part of an organization attempting to upgrade, it’s complicated, difficult and sometimes just plain silly why they can’t move to online and automatic renewal.
Our campus just moved to a brand, new, flashy calendaring system but I don’t think it imports anywhere. Hell, they just figured out that we need an RSS feed. But, I give them credit: the new President also sees that social networking is important and pushed us to be on FB and Twitter. Never too late to join the party.
Kathy - August 31, 2009 at 9:19 pm
I use Remember the Milk Pro ($20/yr?) which syncs with my PDA task list and capable of syncing with Google Calendar. It’s robust & long-term & hangs out in the cloud rather than my desktop.