Keeping it All Together

I am currently in the process of changing jobs. I recently accepted a position at a large consulting company doing User Experience work. In the remaining three weeks at my current position, I have to address the rather daunting issue of how I will manage my calendar, contacts, and other such personal information that is stored on servers and systems possessed by my employer.

After owning two or three Palm devices which were respectively lost and stolen, I gave up on keeping a physical Palm device, but still used the calendar software on my Mac. My employer of the past five years required me to keep an Outlook calendar that I was suposed to use for scheduling meetings and my general availability. I immediately hated Microsoft Outlook, mostly on principal, because it seemed clunky and slow. The main problem was that Microsoft stopped supporting Outlook after Mac OS 9.x and caused numerous crashing-type problems on my computer. To make matters worse, Mac Palm and Mac Outlook didn't have the ability to communicate with one another, and manually maintaining duplicate calendar entries in two different systems ceased to be efficent. This was especially the case for personal events that would impinge upon work time, such as doctor's appointments. So despite my initial misgivings as to the application's usability, because I didn't think I had any choice in the matter, I became a full-fledged Outlook devotee. At least it had a web interface so I could easily acces it from home.

Fast foward five years, and now I am leaving the company, and leaving Outlook. What do to with my contacts? What to do with weddings, Cubs games, concerts, family events scheduled months in advance? I'm sure my new employer will have a calendar and scheduling system, possibly even Outlook. But I have to do something with all of my information in the interrim. And I don't really think it's a good idea to have my entire personal life scheduled in my employer's database. During the next few weeks, I'm going to investigate possible calendar systems and evaluate their utility and usability in-depth, and pick one.

How does everyone else manage their personal information?