GiJit is an add-on for Google Calendar that will not only provide reminders for important upcoming events but will also provide extra information on people and events.
It will help you find different businesses near meetings, find pictures of people you are supposed to be meeting, and connect with your social networks, all for free!
Lots of people use some kind of online or digital calendar program to keep track of important meetings and dates like anniversaries and birthdays. Google Calendar is one of those, and there are many extensions through Chrome that can be added to enhance the experience and make your life easier.
GiJit is a small but useful extension for Google Calendar that will expand your information inflow connected to any appointments or notations you have on your agenda for any given day.
The install process for GiJit is very quick and easy. First you will need to authenticate, or sign into your Google account, which will allow GiJit to then connect itself to your Google Calendar. Now, many of you may not even be aware of Google Calendar, or what it can do for your every day activity as far as organization goes. Simply put, Google Calendar is a free Chrome application that keeps track of your events, appointments, anything that would normally be kept on a calendar. Think of Google Calendar as one of those big desk calendars that take up nearly the whole surface of your work area, just in digital form instead of dead trees. The major advantage to using Google Calendar, aside from saving trees, is that you can input as much information as you like for any given note or appointment. Whereas a physical calendar will only let your write so much into one day’s little box, Google Calendar allows you to not only enter as much text as you want for a note, but also lets you put in things like addresses for appointments, phone numbers, and even set up reminders via email or pop-up in Chrome. For those of us that spend most of our day logged into Google, using one Chrome app or extension or another, having a pop-up reminder for scheduled events is invaluable.
GiJit steps in where Google Calendar leaves off. When you input information like locations and names of people or companies you are meeting with, GiJit will help you by giving you extra information to make that appointment as easy as possible. It will scan locations and, using Google Maps data, show you things like the nearest parking available, coffee shops, and even different restaurants or other conveniences in the area. Knowing what is available to you in any one location can turn three trips into one if you plan ahead. Additionally, GiJit will be able to connect to your Twitter account, and your LinkedIn account, if you have one. In particular, the LinkedIn connection can be useful because it will allow you to add people to your professional network on LinkedIn with the click of a single button on GiJit’s side window for Google Calendar. It’s been my observation that LinkedIn is rapidly becoming the Facebook of businesses so this could be a very handy feature for many of us right now and even more in the future.
In addition to all those features, GiJit is also able to show you different things like time usage. To begin with, it can show you a basic overview of your time planned/spent over the next 48 hours. This information can be useful for those of us trying to squeeze one last meeting in on any given day of the week. If that isn’t enough for you, GiJit can also show you a breakdown of the different kinds of appointments, the different ways you are spending your time over the next 48 hours, in the form of the top five ‘mentions’ listed. This is a feature that requires a little bit of extra work on your part, as you will need to add #hash variables or tags to your appointments but that is pretty easy to do. Once you have done so, you will be able to see that you’ll have spent more time at the #Doctor or the #Office over the coming 48 hours than anywhere else, for instance, and take appropriate action.
The Verdict: GiJit is a handy little tool that will help you get the most of out your Google Calendar and, thereby, the most out of your productive day. There is a mobile app on the way, but in the meantime the Google Calendar add-on is quite useful. It’s simple, powerful, and totally free (just like all great software!) and I would recommend it to anyone who has more than two appointments a week. If you have less than that, you can still find GiJit useful but you might not find it indispensible. In either case, it’s a good piece of free software that helps make your life easier and smoother and we can all use more of those adjectives in our day-to-day. Until next time, my friends.
Get GiJit for Google Calendar here.
