I love Google calendar (Yahoo and 30 boxes also have what I have heard are good calendars, I just found Google to work better for me). I recently discovered it and my life is transformed. Each person can create their own calendar and then give others 'view only' or 'edit functions'. This makes it really easy to coordinate schedules with others (as long as they have internet). You can also email invites to others straight from the calendar. You can create an infinite number of calendars with different colors. For example, my son has school, cub scouts, and soccer calendars that are all blue so I know at a glance who the main person is. I can also share the soccer schedule with the grandparents who can then see it in their own Google calendar. You can select which calendars you want to see if it gets too busy (I have 14 calendars in my Google).
If you are lucky, you can also sync to public calendars for some events and organizations. For example, my son's school has a calendar in Google friendly format so I just link to it and bam I can see my son's school calendar without having to type it in by hand. AND if they make a change to the calendar, it automatically changes in mine. This works really well for the soccer team my husband coaches because of the rainouts. Now I know his game was cancelled before he does (and that he can now pick up the kids and go to cub scouts that night!). I am trying to convince all the organizers of all our activities to do the calendar like this.
My husband actually uses this calendar. He never wrote anything on the paper one. He would tell me some of his stuff and I would remember to write some of it down, nightmare. After I set it up initially with what I had on paper and what I could link, he actually kept up with it. It made sense because when he was at work and found out about something he could put it in super fast instead of trying to remember to put in on the calendar when he got home. He is also stepping up more and helping since he now sees everything more clearly.
I use Outlook at work so I just type my stuff in Outlook and then it syncs to Google. (I haven’t gotten it to work at home because the sync program freezes Outlook at home). I heard on NPR this week that some companies are moving away from Outlook type calendars and toward Google type calendars. For those with internet cell phones, the calendar can go anywhere and you don’t need a blackberry or iphone.
At home, my laptop lives in the kitchen so the calendar is easy to check and add to. When someone brings home a calendar or schedule I sit down and put it in right away and then save all the paper schedules for reference. I haven’t let my kids put their own stuff in yet because they are too young but someday they can do that. The calendar easily shifts from day to week to month and can be printed a variety of ways. I originally envisioned printing it and posting it where the old (color-coded overstuffed) calendar lived but find that the laptop works better. You can have reminders pop up, emailed, or sent to your cell phone. I like to have unusual things emailed to me so they really stand out.
My family’s life does not have a regular weekly routine so I found that I was getting cramps trying to keep everything current and up to date on the written calendar. Here I type it once and then if it gets moved, canceled, or changed I just click a few times and am up to date. The other thing I like is that we can now see the few empty blocks of time and plan for time as a family or couple. OR I can get my hair done ;-) In the past, these moments seemed to sneak up on us and then we squandered them. Now we have family bike rides, trips to the park, and sleep in and be lazy times that would never have happened spur of the moment.
The best thing is that since I started using this I have not had any of those worst mommy moments where I forgot the play or that this is the week my husband is out of town. We used to have many of those moments before Google calendar.