Conferences, Events, Travel and Maximizing My Time

So i have been up since 7am on a beautiful Saturday morning trying to organize my calendar for the next three months and i am totally frustrated. Trying to organize my calendar for events and four conferences that have four online activity calendars/schedulers with four separate logins, plus i need to make hotel and flight reservations as well as appointments so i can maximize my time at these events. Urgh---Who is going to fix this???

Things are certainly getting better and below i highlight one way i am maximizing some of interoperability of web based calendaring using features like iCalendar but i am still having to do a lot of manual work that requires multiple logins and at minimum first time setup on all these services. So of course this activity i am doing this morning is silly because i am reviewing/updating my Outlook calendar (where my work colleagues go to when they need to book appointments so by default my base) , my Google Calendar, my Upcoming.org , my Dopplr plus the calendar on the fridge for the hubby (not for a long while will that one be fixed!). DataPortability anyone?

I invest time and money in all the conferences and events i go to, so i certainly want to maximize the ones i am attending so i can network and meet with as many people as possible. So after spending some time this morning trying to figure out the best way to not only manage my own life but make myself available, as a first step i have created a Google public calendar and using the Calendar embeddable feature i added it to my blog (see on the right side menu).

On my Google public calendar i put the following description:

I am the Business Development Manager for Synaptica and Taxonomy Services at Dow Jones. Part of the Dow Jones Client Solutions team, i am responsible for business development for Synaptica our taxonomy and metadata management tool and work very closely with our Taxonomy Services team.

I am as one of the original co-founders of the DataPortability Project : www.dataportability.org

Please contact me directly at daniela.barbosa@dowjones.com if you would like to schedule a meeting with me at anytime or come find me at the event- this is what i look like in case you are looking for me!

Then i added all my events. Because most of them are on upcoming.org a service i already use often, it was very easy to do because i clicked on "I'm Attending" then clicked to add to my Google Calendar. Then I added personal notes as needed about my attendance at that event so hopefully i can schedule some meetings etc.

It would be awesome if ALL the conference program calendars that i need to fill out for each conference session i want to attend could be portable and then easily included in the details of each calendar entry for people to see which sessions i am attending to get a better idea of my interests. The Semantic Technology Conference Scheduler (what else would you expect from this conference) gets me one step closer.

Hope to see you at one of these events and conferences!