Putting a timetable on the move it announced in September, Google says users will be able to manage all tasks created across various Google apps from Google Tasks starting in March. Beginning May 22nd, Google will automatically move reminders created in the Google Assistant and Calendar apps to Tasks, though users can voluntarily start doing so ahead of time.
The move addresses a major complaint we’ve long had with Google’s task management system and makes it easy to now see everything in one place. It also brings it more in line with Microsoft’s more useful To Do app, which already integrated tasks across Outlook, Planner, and Teams.
The new Google tasks and reminders system still has some issues to iron out. For example, reminders created in Google’s note-taking Keep app will not move to Tasks. Though they’ll remain in the Keep app, this means they will no longer show up in Google Calendar, either. Also, Google Tasks still lacks features other project management apps offer, like the ability to search through your tasks and prioritize them.
Sheena Vasani
Google’s repeated stumbling in messaging may get more attention, but it’s certainly not the only area where the company is fumbling along, launching products with overlapping features that don’t quite match up against the competition and fail to get traction. Google’s tasks and reminders are the perfect example of these confusing and redundant experiences. You can create reminders in Calendar, through Google Assistant, the Tasks app, or in Google Keep, and this works fine on a basic level: you are reminded of that thing you needed. But good luck finding a single place to manage these items!
Between the other options for setting reminders, Tasks seemed thoroughly abandoned, with next to no updates to the mobile app and no dedicated web site – one of the few Google services that doesn’t have a proper page, another being the comparatively recent Google Home. On the web, Tasks was confined to a sidebar inside Gmail/Calendar, competing for space with the much more useful Keep.
Even after this purported consolidation, Google Keep may remain a better task management system for casual use: you start writing a note, then add a time or place to be reminded of – a good place to point out that Tasks does not have location-based reminders, a feature that has been removed from Google Assistant as well a while back (presumably to align it for this upcoming integration with Tasks?). You can even divide a task into subtasks in Google Keep by adding checkboxes inside the note.
I guess the only advantage Tasks has over Keep is that in Tasks you can set up different due dates and reminders for each subtask, which, to me at least, feels like a rather niche feature. The current implementation itself is half-baked: in Calendar, subtasks are displayed independently of the main task, and there doesn’t seem to be any connection between their due dates, for example automatically setting the due date of the master task to the latest due date of its subtasks, or marking the main task as done when all its subitems are done. A proper task management system should also have start dates for tasks, and allow them to span multiple days. What Google is offering now is nothing more than… rebranded reminders.
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