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Quick question: what is the One and only most essential tool for any productivity fan?

You guessed it – the calendar.

There are many reasons why you’d want to use Google Calendar for your time management: first of all, it’s free; second, it’s online(you can access it from everywhere). Third, it has SMS alerts, which is probably the single feature I use most. The one major downside of Google Calendar has is… being an online tool; a less than perfect user interface, less than instantaneous responsiveness. Luckily, this all is in the past as of today:

Google announced CalDAV support for Google Calendar in Apple’s iCal(version 3.x – on Mac OS X v10.5+ ). In layman’s terms, this means seamless bidirectional synchronization of calendar events. No more awkward emails, no more missed meetings(actually.. this isn’t such a good news, as we all know it – meetings are productivity killers).

Here’s a step by step walkthrough in setting up Google Calendar synchronization:

1. First, you download on your OSX 10.5 mac the setup tool, called Calaboration. It’s in zip format, so you’ll want to unarchive it. Go ahead and run it, entering your Google login credentials, then click Sign In.

2. Select which of the Google Calendars you want to add to your iCal.
3. If you haven’t already added your Google email(login) to Address Book, you’ll want to do this, or else “You won’t be able to invite or email guests to Google Calendar events within iCal if your address is not in your Address Book.”

4. Your Google Calendar will now appear in iCal’s list of calendars, and iCal will sync any changes to and from Google Calendar.

Event information will refresh every 5 minutes; if you want to change this interval, you can do it in the iCal > Preferences > Accounts menu, from the ‘Refresh calendars’ drop-down. You can also refresh calendars manually, by pressing the Apple and R keys at the same time.

This is it. Easy and efficient, much like most of Google’s online tools.
Happy productivity everyone. And remember to keep yourselves out of meetings.