Use Google Calendar to Log Conversations

You’re meeting with more people, and having more phone and IM conversations with clients, and the information is getting harder to manage, especially the simple act of remembering what it was you talked about with who. Here are 5 reasons why you should use Google Calendar to log conversations:

1.) Search-rich metadata- You can search on date, contact name, or anything you leave in the details section.

2.) Date-based record of progression- Maybe on the 2nd of March, you asked about the delivery of your new database load balancer. On the 14th of May, you asked again, and she said it’d be ready soon. On June 1, you might terminate the rest of the contract, because you’ve reviewed all the previous correspondence, and you’re not happy with the events as they transpired. (You also then have records to give another party, should a dispute become litigious.

3.) You can share the notes- Google Calendar lets you send the info to invitees of the event (in this case, the conversation), which means you’ll both have the same account of what transpired.

4.)Access the info anywhere- You could be in your hotel room in the client’s town, and you might want to brush up on the logs to be sure you remember where her head is at with regards to your last proposal.

5.)Ajaxy Goodness- I’m not kidding. It’s a nice interface, and it helps you with the actual task of logging the notes pertinent to a call or IM. Sometimes, the look and feel of an application is helpful in convincing us to actually practice using it in our workflow. But… if you don’t think that’s a good enough Number 5.

Alternative #5: No Paper- Being a practitioner of GTD, you can say that this information is already filed as reference.

(Yes, you can do all these same things in Outlook.)

It’s a simple way to keep all the multi-threaded conversations in your head straight without a lot of effort, and that qualifies it as something you might consider adding to your workflow.