The best way to cope with snow and sub-zero temperatures is to keep busy and by quickly glancing at our calendar for February, we’d probably not notice a gang of polar-bear-riding walruses leading their Arctic army past our window.
After trying various different methods to organise ourselves over the last year, we recently settled on using a simple system of Google Calendars. Each employee has their own work calendar and a ‘global’ Spoiled Milk calendar is maintained too.
By using Google’s sharing system each person has a wonderful colour coded view of what he and everybody else is doing. These different calendars can be quickly toggled on and off as required. Of course it’s also possible to integrate personal calendars into the system and set them to private to stop your workmates from discovering your monthly chess club meetings and trips to the doctor.
Combining this with a simple usage policy (prefixes such as M: for meetings, P: for projects, A: for administration, etc.) it very quickly becomes a powerful tool for everything from scheduling project work, to setting up meetings and recording when the tax man should be paid. The ability to quickly switch from an uncluttered view of what you’re working on for the next week into a monthly overview of everyone’s activities is very powerful. Google’s simple and responsive interface at last makes it viable to use a web application in this way. Internet outages are of course still a problem, but the trade off for accessibility is worth it.
So returning to our coming agenda: at the start of the month we are being visited by illustration maestro Holly Wales who will hopefully be set to task on brand-managing the upcoming Forma Nova Festival. The following week will be spent in London to tout our wares around the city and catch up with old friends.
Finally, we’ll be dashing back to our studio for the 20th, just in time to welcome our new intern from Germany, David Nagel. David is currently studying graphic design in Bremen and will be joining us for 6 weeks in Copenhagen.
