Hey Lifehacker, I am a fly-in fly-out worker and live in a share house with a few other FIFO workers. Our work schedules often change and it can be tricky keeping track of who will be in the house and when. What is the best software/app to create a shared calender that is easy for all of us to update with our movements? Thanks, OuttaTime
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Dear OuttaTime,
For a simple solution, we’d suggest creating a shared Google Calendar which is accessible to everyone. No matter what smartphone your housemates are using — I’m imagining it’s a given under the circumstances that everyone has one — a Google calendar should be easy to add. (This advice is applicable to any share house, actually.)
To create a shared calendar from within the browser, log into Google, click on the settings cog in the top right corner and choose ‘Settings’. Go to the ‘Calendars’ tab and click on ‘Create new calendar’. After giving it a name, description and location, share it with your housemates by adding their email address and giving each one access to ‘Make changes to events’. That then makes the calendar accessible from any browser or mobile phone. (The recipients don’t even need a Gmail account.) Each housemate can add their periods at the house, including details of the flights they use if you like.
The biggest challenge with shared calendars is getting people to update them, but at least this approach eliminates having to install a separate app on your phone. If anyone has specific apps to recommend, we’d love to hear about them in the comments.
Cheers
Lifehacker
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Comments
2 responses to “Ask LH: How Can We Organise A FIFO Household Schedule?”
massive google calender fan. I use the following setup.
A personal calender, i share this full read with family, friends and girlfriend. This has the bulk of what i do in it and i show detail not just busy/free.
A household calender, this has rolling events such as bin night, power bill, etc…
A private calender, so if i need to plan a surprise my girlfriend doesn’t see pickup zyx or make booking for abc.
Calenders i always have open are all of the above + synced outlook calendar and my girlfriends google calender. I have access to a couple of friends but only turn them on when i am trying to organise something.
On my phone i have calwidget which is a very slim text agenda which occupies most of my home screen.
It sounds like over kill but it makes the mundane stuff like shopping or washing easier to plan.
That’s awesome. I wish my friends used any sort of calendar like that so we could share/sync.
I just started FIFO a few months ago and, with a young family, I was trying to figure out how to best manage.
I ended up stumbling over the FIFO RnR app for ios (fifosite.com/rnr, or search itunes). Its pretty good, and allows everyone to see each others rosters.
There are some failures (it relies on each user having a net connection at the time they want to use the app… sometimes not possible out on a remote site), but thus far it seems to work okay.
And, for clarity, I don’t have anything to do with the app makers or whatever… this isnt a shill post, I just thought it might be helpful 🙂