I’ve been using Planner mode for the last few months, to keep track of appointments. I like it because it integrates well with Emacs, which is my main environment. But I’ve decided it just doesn’t cut the mustard. It lacks two main things. Firstly, it can’t do ICAL based mail negotiation of meetings. Secondly, it lacks a nice overviewer. I developed something which addresses the latter, but it’s not enough. So I keep on missing early meetings, because I didn’t see them coming up the day before.

In the end, I’ve decided to go for Google calendar. It generally integrates nicely with mail, although I’ll have to check my gmail account periodically, which is a pain as I don’t use it for anything else. The AJAX interface of the calendar is quite nice; I don’t need to use it as rapidly as email, so that it’s a bit clunky is not a huge problem. Pity that right clicks don’t work.

Moving current events is going to be a pain, though. I think I shall keep planner, though, as a task manager. It’s pretty good at that.

Originally published on my old blog site.