How do you manage your family calendar?

I am a mom with a calendar crisis. I  seem to be managing too many calendars, while feeling like I don't have control over all the meetings, birthday parties, events and open houses which fill our days.



As a Macintosh user with an iPhone, I use iCal to manage my appointments, as well as anything involving the children. At home I have a beautiful paper calendar hanging in the kitchen, on which I write all the family events, as well as any work items which may impact that schedule. And my husband? Well, I have no idea what he's doing or when he has something to do – which is when we usually run into trouble.



I have been told by my business partner, and others, that I need to embrace Google calendar because it will allow us to consolidate all the calendars, and the system will send me my daily agenda via e-mail (kind of like my own personal assistant). The problem has been that I couldn't easily sync my iCal with Google Calendar, and I really don't need to update my calendar in one more place.



That is until I discovered Spanning Sync, an application which syncs iCal calendars with Google calendar – easily, quickly, and most importantly, automatically. After trying the 15 day trial I decided to splurge, and spend $65 to purchase the software, which covers all the machines I use (the license is per person, rather than per computer).



The price is a little high, but to quote a certain commercial, the promise of being more organized is "priceless."



Now, our calendars are "in sync" and even my husband is on board, updating the calendar with his meetings and events (which are automatically added to my iCal calendar when I sync my events).



I know I'm not the only one struggling with the best way to manage the family calendars – how do you do it?