I've been spending a lot of time lately reading various management books, how to cope with a difficult work place, crazy bosses, assholes, and a bunch of workplace etiquette books. I've been thinking of things, from quite some time ago, that really rubbed me the wrong way, and one of them was relating to the outlook calendar.

I generally use iCal on my mac (at home) to keep track of personal things like appointments, doctor's visits, people's birthdays, and so on. I synchronize my phone with iCal so that I can have this information on the go. Generally I do not use Outlook (at work) to keep track of appointments because the great majority of appointments are personal. My job is not one of those jobs where I have meeting after meeting and I need to keep track of it all in outlook.

Back when I had a PocketPC device, for some reason it synched with outlook and all of the daily events synchronized with outlook (and made me look unavailable for the day). These were events like birthdays, name days, national holidays, saint feasts etc. The department secretary (false title used to protect the not-so-innocent) attempted to determine a good time for a meeting between a number of parties at the library, including me. When she peeked at my outlook availability it looked like I was unavailable for the whole day. She then called my boss, who talked to me and we wasted a whole ten minutes on the issue.

Could this have been avoided? Of course! Instead of assuming that everyone schedules their time in outlook, just email the people you need to schedule a meeting with, and see what their availability is! If we all spent time making sure our Outlook calendar was up-to-date with up-to-the-minute information, we would get very little work done. Also, just because no meeting is scheduled in my calendar, it doesn't mean I am free.

Don't assume that just because party A uses technology X, that all parties use technology X.