In the recent past, many of you are aware that my mother has has some health challenges which are difficult for us three "kids" to manage, since none of us lives in the same state, and all three of us have full time jobs. Plus, my brother still has a child at home.

I just saw an article in the New York Times which offered an excellent way for people like us to manage information sharing.

Prior to reading this, I had been the designated information disseminator, and I had created a group email system. Each time I had an update to share -- which during times of crisis might be more often than once a day -- I'd pull out my group email, copy and paste the list of addressees into a new message form, and fire off the next message.

I'd put the date into the "subject" line, so the recipients would be able to track the recency of each message with ease.

As my mother became aware of my notices, she began to request that I add people to my mailing list, and the notification task kept getting bigger. Some days, just managing these messages was about all I got done.

Perhaps some of you have managed similar systems.

Which is why today I am passing along the idea of using a shared Google calendar to manage the information.

Hope this helps. And, if you've already latched onto the Google Calendar as a way to allow a group of people to both keep track of details AND encourage each group member to self-update the content, please add your comments to this discussion.
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