As the new year approaches, many of your clients will be asking you about choosing a paper planner or an electronic calendar, selecting the one that best meets their needs, or using their calendar more effectively. This month’s Professional Organizers Blog Carnival includes lots of tips from your colleagues to help you provide your clients with the guidance they need!

Calendars

Let’s begin with Stephanie LH Calahan‘s post,  The Great Calendar Debate – Paper or Electronic – 21 Experts Weigh In. As Stephanie explains,

One item frequently purchased at this time of year is a calendar or planner for the upcoming year.

But, what is the right kind of planner to use?  Some say the traditional paper planner is the best, while others swear by their smart-phone or on line tool.  How do you decide what is best for you?

Learn what my colleagues and friends had to say about the “Great Calendar Debate.”   They provide tips to help you decide as well as some recommended tools.

Clare Kumar brings us Time Management Strategies – 3 Tools to Manage Your Time. Clare says,

As we approach 2011 with alarming speed it’s time to select a calendar. This requires some thought to the need for portability, number of users and the amount of information you need to capture there.  It’s quite possible that one is not enough.

In Your Calendar and You, Ellen Delap offers some tips on choosing a calendar and tells us which one she likes the best.

One organizer who supports the electronic version is Deb Lee, who tells us why in her post, Simple Tech: 6 Benefits of Using an Online Calendar.

Jeri Dansky doesn’t reveal her personal preference, but tells us that One Calendar That Deserves a Post All Its Own was one of the most popular ones she’s written recently.

Of course, to be a useful time management tool, even a carefully chosen calendar must be used effectively, and several experts had advice in this area:

In Unclog Your Calendar to Avoid Opportunity Overload, Lisa Montanaro shares an excerpt from the Time Management chapter of her new book, The Ultimate Life Organizer: An Interactive Guide to a Simpler, Less Stressful & More Organized Life, which will be published by Peter Pauper Press in February 2011.

In her blog post, Michelle Panzlaff offers several Tips to use your calendar effectively, adding the following tip for readers of the Professional Organizers Blog Carnival:

Manage your time. Create a schedule for yourself as you would for any project. When life gets busy or you get distracted it can be easy to let things slide so having a written schedule will help keep you on track.

Paul H. Burton reminds us to Schedule Snippets of Time Between Appointments, and Barbara Tako explains how to Simplify your calendar in 2011

Ramona Creel warns us about Overscheduling Syndrome. She says,

If your family’s calendar is too full and your children are inheriting your exhaustion at having too much to do, maybe it’s time to revamp your schedule and set some healthy boundaries!

We close this month’s Professional Organizers Blog Carnival on a lighter note, with Julie Bestry‘s Lost Time, Dinner With the King of Norway and The Curse of Multiple Calendars. Since this is Julie’s tenth time participating in the Carnival, she is our newest Professional Organizers Blog Carnival Star Blogger. Congratulations, Julie!

The next Professional Organizers Blog Carnival will be published on Tuesday, January 11, 2011, and the theme will be Goal Setting. Submissions will be due by noon EST on Monday, January 10, so why don’t you mark that on YOUR calendar right now! Going forward, the Carnival will always be on the second Tuesday of the month, so those of you who use electronic calendars can go ahead and create a recurring appointment.

See the complete schedule of topics and dates for 2011.

A big thanks to everyone who took the time to submit a post at this very busy time of year! Looking forward to seeing many of you again next month and to welcoming some new participants. In the meantime, please take a few minutes to check out this month’s submissions and to network with your organizing colleagues by leaving comments and sharing your favorite posts with your social networks.