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1. Tell us about your organization.

My organization (wait what) is just me, my manager, and my drummer. I'm a touring musician and music producer, and I often travel for shows -- I'm based in San Francisco, but in the last year, I've been able to play shows from Toronto to Rwanda to a stadium show at a festival in New York. I'm also a graduate student, getting my MBA at Stanford, so my schedule gets pretty packed.

2. How are you using Google Calendar?

A typical week for me has a couple of music-related appointments -- meeting with my manager, phone calls with booking agents, and scheduling time to work on music -- along with things like Marketing class, group HR projects, and the social events that come along with business school. Recently, I've been making sure to schedule time to sleep.

I'm also a big fan of the 2010 World Series Champion San Francisco Giants, so I use the sports calendar to keep track of when they're in town and when I can check out their games. Finally, being able to share my calendar with my girlfriend helps make sure that we always have a couple days each week to hang out. I don't know what I'd do without Google Calendar -- it allows me to get the most that I can out of life.

3. How is Google Calendar helping you achieve your mission?

With having to balance music and school, Google Calendar is huge for me -- I have my flights in there, my show times and venue locations are in the event, multiple timezones is enabled, and I share my calendar with my manager to make sure we always end up on the same page. From Android, I can easily pull up directions in Google Maps and figure out how to get where I need to be -- I can't imagine doing it without Google Calendar. The Tasks gadget keeps me on track for school assignments, and also helps me prioritize exactly what I need to do each day to accomplish what I want -- seeing everything in checklist form can be a little intimidating at first, but is really critical to keeping me on task.

                   Charm City Cakes

1. Tell us about yourself and/or your organization

Charm City Cakes is a Baltimore-based specialty cake shop. We have grown to be somewhat well known throughout the country and world on account of the reality TV show "Ace of Cakes", which was filmed in our shop for five years. We are a fairly busy cake shop, with 10-15 cake orders a week and a staff of over 15. We are about to expand our business with a second shop in Los Angeles.

2. How are you using Google Calendar?

We use Google calendar for all of our scheduling needs. We have nine calendars within our account for everything we do: cake orders, staff time off, client appointments, and much more. This allows us to see all the calendars lined up against each other, which is really necessary for scheduling. Before we switched to Google, we literally had one wire-bound paper calendar. While it was charming in its old fashioned-ness, it was a nightmare to maintain. I was constantly pouring white-out over things and/or erasing so many times I made holes in the paper. I had a color-coded system of highlighting different kind of events. The busier we got, the more our paper calendar looked like a psycho neon nightmare every week. Not only that, but there was only one calendar - so if I was at home and couldn't remember what time an appointment was the next day, I was out of luck, as I had no access to the paper book. The switch to Google Calendar was so easy and the benefits were IMMEDIATELY obvious.

Being able to turn on and off the "view" of different calendars allows it to be simplified for each user. Color coded calender events still allow us to glance at each week and see what's going on quickly. And best of all, anyone can access the calendar from anywhere, anytime. Being able to access the bakery's multiple calendars from my cell phone has been an absolute godsend for many of us.

3. How is Google Calendar helping you achieve your mission?

Google calendar has allowed us to become more efficient, organized, and communicate better within the staff. It has allowed us to keep better track of our cakes on the schedule so that we don't overbook a week, which keeps our workload manageable and thus, our cakes are the best they can possibly be, which is our ultimate goal and the mission of our company.

1. Tell us about your organization.