Google Calendar and Assistant Reminders Will Migrate to Google Tasks Soon

https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/02/calendar-and-assistant-reminders-to-tasks-migration.html

by e2e4 • 3 years ago

122 115 3 years ago

workspaceupdates.googleblog.com

How about a task you could pin to the top of your gmail. Maybe call it "Inbox". That'd be super handy rather than having to go to a different app to manage your tasks.

topicseed2• 3 years ago

Use the Gmail sidebar (on the right)? You have Cal/Tasks/Contacts widgets and it's handy

andybak2• 3 years ago

You are replying to a comment that was sarcastically referring to an excellent feature in a product that Google "retired": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbox_by_Gmail

gregjw• 3 years ago

lol

disgruntledphd2• 3 years ago

I'm still really bitter about the botched migration from inbox reminders when they shut it down.

hackernewds• 3 years ago

Love that Google calendar does this

alexilliamson• 3 years ago

Still really bitter about Inbox shutting down. It was really good!

topicseed2• 3 years ago

Finally. The Reminder, Tasks, and Calendar experience was all over the place for now a couple of years. Assistants creating one when you wanted the other didn't help either.

kmac_• 3 years ago

Well, it will be still fragmented, Keep has it's own reminders.

aaronharnly• 3 years ago

And don’t forget the mess that is “assigning” comments in Google Docs. Try finding a single queue to work from of all of your assigned comments.

xiwenc4• 3 years ago

Not related to google but for my personal workflow i like to manage my tasks in Apple Reminders apps and see them in one unified view in my Apple Calendar apps.

Details can be read and implemented following: https://cinaq.com/blog/2022/11/22/the-missing-link-between-r...

Just yesterday someone out of nowhere contacted me while he was trying out my setup. He loved it. Hope this helps others here on HN.

submeta2• 3 years ago

BusyCal shows both calendars and Apple Reminders items, and it’s way more sophisticated (different calendar views and filters, for work and private, for projects, etc).

Love the app, on iOS and Mac. Because it’s got a more sophisticated view on my Reminders. In today‘s view it‘ll group the reminders based on the list or other aspects.

greggsy• 3 years ago

I’m still a bit salty that BusyCal and Fantastical moved to subscription, models, and failed to do any further innovation.

criddell2• 3 years ago

Your article is good but the callouts are barely readable on my iPad which is in dark mode and fairly dim because I’m reading in a dark room. A little more contrast would help a lot.

At the end you mention the lack of timer based triggers. You can do this with Shortcut personal automations. For example, I have a WFH focus mode. I run an automation at 8am on weekdays that checks if I’m at home and if I am, it turns on WFH mode until late afternoon.

My problem with your setup is that it doesn’t update the events when I modify or complete the reminders.

xiwenc4• 3 years ago

Thanks for pointing out the dark mode issue. Hope to address it soon.

Regarding trigger i meant there is no standard scheduled system like a cronjob.

The article is meant to inspire others. It solves a very specific problem i have. It’s far from perfect but does the job.

Will take a look at your WFH mode suggestion. Timer/alarm based triggers require manual run confirmation. Allowing non-interactive run is a must in my case to avoid distractions.

raybb• 3 years ago

I use the apple reminders on Mac and tasks.org on Android synced with nextcloud. I don't love the apple reminders app but until nextcloud tasks supports recurring tasks I'm kinda stuck with it.

I took a look at implementing it a year or so ago and it's a decent amount of work even to just have the non UI parts working (so that checking a task doesn't delete it if recurrence was set elsewhere)

https://github.com/nextcloud/tasks/issues/34

smallpipe• 3 years ago

That's really cool! One thing I can think of, instead of setting the shortcut to run when your phone is plugged in, you can make an automation start when an app is opened/closed, so if you use this on the Reminders app, it should do the sync automatically.

xiwenc4• 3 years ago

Thanks a lot for the suggestion! Not sure if this was a recent feature/trigger in shortcut automations.

Will update the article soon with this addition.

speg• 3 years ago

One of the issues I got with Apple Shortcuts is the lack of timer based triggers.

That’s odd, I have (just double checked) an automation to run a shortcut every day at 0030 on my iPad. Maybe it’s just disabled on iOS?

xiwenc4• 3 years ago

Ah if i recall, in the past timer based triggers cannot be run automatically. It required manual confirmation.

That has changed it seems. Thanks for pointing out.

not_knuth• 3 years ago

I'm still waiting for Google tasks to be able to have a duration so that I can visualize the time commitment in my calendar. I can't believe this isn't a feature yet...

Having a "planned" date, where the task visually appears in my calendar, as well as a separate due date would be great too.

killjoywashere2• 3 years ago

The most useful thing that's missing from pretty much any tasking system is suspense date: at what point is it chalked up as a fail and life moves on? This is the date most senior leaders in my org use the most. It is the coin of the realm.

The second most useful thing is the warning notice. If someone could reliably figure out how many hours/days/weeks heads-up people are going to need to execute before suspense, that would be amazing. But it's very hard for someone without visibility on your own workload to estimate that. If you're buried under a global crisis, sure people will cut you some slack on your HR actions, but you can bet they'll hold you accountable for budget. An executive assistant can make their career if they can make accurate warning notices for their boss.

Spivak2• 3 years ago

That's why I like having my todos in Notion I can filter all todos with a date more than x days passed into a missed view.

lawik• 3 years ago

Are they goong to break the most important Google app for me? This is .. exciting.

My calendar events are not tasks. The reminders for them are not tasks either. So this is worrying for me.

brap• 3 years ago

None of these things are being migrated

Spivak2• 3 years ago

The second one sure looks like it is.

stuaxo• 3 years ago

As long as it still pops up reminders on my phone I don't really care what it's called.

Still - renaming stuff can be annoying, they renamed google pay to wallet and I only found out when I went to pay for something and it wasn't there.

bitshiftfaced2• 3 years ago

A couple of years ago, I tried migrating all of my reminders to Tasks. I can't remember why exactly, but for some reason I immediately had to go back to calendar reminders. There was some functionality that worked differently, but I can't remember what exactly. It might've been something about how calendar reminders persist in the taskbar until you click them away, and I need that in particular.

DoingIsLearning• 3 years ago

Any good sugestions of calendar alternatives in the Android space?

hsjqllzlfkf• 3 years ago

Second

arkitaip• 3 years ago

Fastmail has a pretty good calendar when you get subscribe for email. My main complaint is who don't use embedded calendar links and instead send you .ics files or force you to use Google Calendar.

naavis• 3 years ago

It's otherwise good, but the Fastmail calendar sadly doesn't have an Android widget, nor can you create reminders like in Google Calendar. You can only create events.

I migrated emails to Fastmail a few years ago, but have been holding on to Google Calendar.

mkl2• 3 years ago

I'm just experimenting with this. Is there a way to make the week view scroll a week at a time instead of a day? Is there a way to duplicate an event?

javajosh2• 3 years ago

I have a suggestion for Google: make an interactive graphical mind map representation of your products and shows relationships between them. Have that be the response to google.com/products. Add layers, like for a map, that show old and new names, and proposed names. Make an attempt to identity the product-neutral set of "degrees of freedom" that each product gives the user. This would be a fun, stand-alone project for an intern. Maybe use D3 or processing.js for the front-end.

Such an artifact would be useful to users and Google leadership alike.

Eumenes• 3 years ago

They must no doubt have this internally

killjoywashere2• 3 years ago

Wasn't it like 10 years ago that they had a 3B line monorepo for the entire org? Does g3 still have a stranglehold on the org?

cloudking• 3 years ago

Yes, it hasn't been released because they are still trying to figure it out

rolisz• 3 years ago

For an intern? You mean it would be a PhD thesis in and of itself. Google has had more than 18 chat apps, some of which had the same name... At the same time, but couldn't talk to each other .

javajosh2• 3 years ago

A really smart intern.

Anon4Now• 3 years ago

Some companies are so profitable, they can hide layers and layers of managerial ineptitude. Think how great Google could be if they had cohesion and oversight.

ape4• 3 years ago

Future archaeologists will would consider this a Rosetta Stone

taeric• 3 years ago

I remember Buzz and Reader both doing very well at this, oddly. Then they killed it for plus, of course. Still the dumbest thing they have done, to my mind.

delecti• 3 years ago

Also, many of which were essentially the same, despite the different names. Theoretically a message made in Google Talk in 2005 would have been visible in chat history through migrations/rebrandings to Hangouts and Chat. You'd need a fair bit of research and a flowchart to explain them all.

yrro• 3 years ago

Where more than one product has the same name then both should be renamed. From that point onwards, they should never re-use an old name. Things would be so much less confusing.

RobotToaster• 3 years ago

Can't help but think it would look like that Charlie Kelly scene https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1430367-pepe-silvia

godzillabrennus• 3 years ago

Maybe they could pull their heads out of their rears and put Google Duplex on iPhone?

Seems like a 7 year old tech still beats Siri and could have a halo effect for android but most Americans have iPhones and can’t use it.

jeffparsons• 3 years ago

On my Google phone, if I try to edit a reminder through the GUI, it refuses to show me a screen to edit the reminder. Instead, it spends several seconds loading the voice assistant, which then eventually asks aloud what I would like to change. It's been like that ever since they started pushing the assistant stuff harder, whenever that was.

If they've fixed that, then I'll be happy. I never did like my phone suddenly yelling at me in otherwise quiet places.

oblio• 3 years ago

Google Maps has an auto mode on Android.

Well, if you set a destination and start the trip, it shows a big X button at the bottom, to stop the trip.

Guess what loads slowly and goes in the location of the big X button?

You guessed right, the Google voice assistant, which I don't use.

They're really pushing the voice assistant.

Already__Taken• 3 years ago

the voice assistant keeps thinking my podcast is talking to it

mnky9800n• 3 years ago

The problem is the voice assistant doesn't work the way you want it to work which is like star trek. But the reason the computer works in star trek is because it's either a) a hyper intelligent ai that automates the ship so people can go about more interesting activities such as exploring the Galaxy or b) it's a storytelling tool that enters the script whenever a boring thing for the characters to do comes up so they can get back to pushing the story along. Neither of those are really accessible to us today. But that doesn't stop people from wishing they were.

indymike3• 3 years ago

pushing the voice assistant

By doing so, they are putting lots of things at risk. Up until the last year Android Auto has been so good that I think most people would rather use it than the in-built system in their car. The last UI update made it kind of frustrating. So frustrating that car companies will get the misguided notion they can do it better.

kyrra• 3 years ago

Googler opinions are my own.

The same thing was happening to me for a really long time. I migrated to Tasks and it's been working fine since then (mainly because it's a different app). There are some minor quirks with the new app, nothing that bothers me, it's just different. But overall I'd say it's an improvement.

Hopefully the rollout a d migration works out well.

Y_Y2• 3 years ago

I just never enable the voice assistant from the start and I don't have problems like this. I don't know if it's possible to disable after the fact. All I want voice for is occasional text input and that works fine.

xnx• 3 years ago

This is a good thing. Google is rightly criticized for having overlapping/duplicate functionally in their services. This is an example of them slowly/responsibly combining some.

oefrha• 3 years ago

This is good only if the replacement/combined product isn't inferior and important features don't get lost in the process. I've been burned multiple times already.

hgsgm3• 3 years ago

By adding a whole separate app to juggle?

fbdab103• 3 years ago

Part of consolidation would be ensuring migration from the old to the new. Something which Google is not attempting to do here.

anothernewdude• 3 years ago

The worst UI is one that changes unexpectedly.

edandersen• 3 years ago

"Reminders created in Keep will not be migrated to Tasks — they will still be available in Keep, but they will no longer be displayed in Google Calendar once the migration is complete."

So they didn't finish the User Story?

nkrisc• 3 years ago

As a user, I want my reminders on Google Keep to be migrated to Google tasks so that I can experience the benefits of reduced maintenance, development, and improved product experience from a more cohesive and consolidated product strategy.

cobertos• 3 years ago

As a user, I would like to get off this wild ride and have my products work as intended.

indymike3• 3 years ago

This is a huge failure. Google Keep was really, really good.

SloopJon• 3 years ago

Damn it! I forget why I started using Keep reminders in the first place, but that's where I put all my bill reminders, including annual and semi-annual premiums.

It is beyond a cliche at this point that Google unceremoniously dumps products and features (RIP Reader and Bookmarks), but when you're creating "a single experience for managing to-dos across Google," why, oh why, wouldn't you migrate reminders from Keep? Did they forget about it until too late?

htrp• 3 years ago

Different team in a different org.

ajmurmann• 3 years ago

Instead of cancelling products and getting bad reputation for it, is Google now quiet quitting their products?

RheingoldRiver2• 3 years ago

Does anyone know why I would've stopped getting a daily google calendar reminder on February 21st? This is a bit before the rollover for personal accounts. It was to take pills that I need to take daily, and I think I missed several doses (not consecutively, I often remember without the email) before I realized that the email was gone, which is pretty frightening.

andyjih_• 3 years ago

I’m still getting mine. Might be worth checking spam?

RheingoldRiver2• 3 years ago

Definitely not going to spam, but thanks for the suggestion. Since you said you're getting them, I'll try recreating the reminder and see what happens.

mkl2• 3 years ago

I'm interested in people's experiences switching from Google Calendar to Fastmail Calendar. Is Fastmail a good replacement?

It sounds like basic calendar events will be unchanged by this (though I'm not completely clear on that), but Google Calendar is the only Google service I'm using regularly and I wouldn't mind getting off it.

nashashmi• 3 years ago

We're missing a task synchronization server. we already have a Calendar synchronization server.

nixpulvis• 3 years ago

I guess this shows how cynical I am, but this title really confused me. Here I was thinking Google was going to do away with their calendar.

I mean, if it meant that they started working on interop features and standards again maybe I'd be excited...

binkHN• 3 years ago

I did this migration on my phone and it broke reminder creation on my Google smart speakers. Only works on my phone now.

suddenclarity• 3 years ago

I'm not really sure if reminders are different from events. I get an email the day before any repeating birthday I've added to my Google Calendar. Will this functionality be impacted of this change? The blog post does a poor job explaining how it works today and what will change.

hgsgm3• 3 years ago

Reminders are the reminder part without an event. They don't have a fixed time/duration, they have a start time and duration, and they float until marked completed or deletes.

martyvis• 3 years ago

I installed the Tasks app on my Pixel. I saw my reminders were all in My Tasks. I easily created anew list. I cannot see how I can move a task from the default bucket My Tasks to my new list.

Am I missing something?

indymike3• 3 years ago

Honestly, this just creates opportunities for people to try out new products when they rage quit because some deeply buried feature in Google’s to-do feature makes their personal workflow crash.

crazygringo3• 3 years ago

There seems to be a tremendous amount of confusion here in the comments.

Calendar is not going away, calendar events are not being touched, this has nothing to do with alerts for calendar events, and this does not require you to use a new/separate app.

Google has simply had different things called both "reminders" and "tasks" across apps, for legacy reasons. For a long time there's been a "reminder" object in Calendar (different from events), and then a "task" object got added as well (that shares data with the Tasks app). There's no good UX reason for these to be separate types of objects, so now "reminders" and "tasks" are being consolidated into just "tasks". But they're staying in Calendar. (And can also be edited in the Tasks app which has been around for years already.)

This is good. It's simplifying.

(As to why they're now splitting off reminders created in Google Keep rather than integrating them too, I don't know for sure. But I've never understood the use case of reminders in Keep at all, so I wouldn't be surprised if they deprecate that feature entirely. Keep reminders came before Tasks existed at all, but now you should just use Tasks.)

dragonwriter• 3 years ago

This is good. It's simplifying

Crippling Keep is neither good nor simplifying.

crazygringo3• 3 years ago

What do you use reminders for in Keep? Keep is for keeping snippets of text, notes -- I've never understood why you'd put a reminder on that.

If you were using Keep as a kind of reminders/tasks list, you should switch to Tasks for that, since it's much better designed for that use case.

screamingninja• 3 years ago

But I've never understood the use case of reminders in Keep at all, so I wouldn't be surprised if they deprecate that feature entirely. Keep reminders came before Tasks existed at all, but now you should just use Tasks.

Keep reminders intuitively made sense to me. They're sticky notes that you can label/index/search. Reminders allow you to be reminded of a specific note, which I find tremendously useful. Also location based reminders are great, e.g. grocery list that pops up when you're at the store.

"Tasks" suffered from the obvious- they were integrated in Gmail through labs and then calendar widget, but then keep reminders and assistant reminders appeared on the calendar. It was confusing. Keep makes it relatively simple, though you're right, it can be deprecated soon. Still not sure I'm ready to use "Tasks" yet.

amluto• 3 years ago

Playing devil’s advocate: calendar events happen at a place and time, and they have a finite, nonzero duration.

Tasks are things that one should do.

A reminder reminds the user of something at a specific time or perhaps at a heuristically chosen convenient time in a range.

So a satellite flying directly overhead or someone’s birthday or simply wanting to be reminded of a fact on a day is not a task. There’s nothing to do, and checking it off makes no sense. (Although wishing someone happy birthday could be a task.). Simply showing the user the reminder accomplishes the goal. On the other hand, most calendar programs struggle with events with no duration, and overlaying reminders onto a schedule makes the schedule harder to read.

suddenexample• 3 years ago

This is over indexing on semantics. The feature name is now Tasks, but the functionality is exactly the same and is now better for Tasks users.

anon84873628• 3 years ago

Is a reminder usually reminding you to complete a task?

crazygringo3• 3 years ago

What you're calling reminders are just calendar events.

A birthday is a repeating calendar event. You're free to create a calendar event with 0:00 duration in Google Calendar, it works fine. You can also create all-day events that show up at the top and don't make the schedule harder to read.

extua• 3 years ago

This describes more or less how I use calendar reminders. Typically, if I see a trailer for a film that looks good, I make a reminder several months ahead to check it out. I don't think of these as 'tasks to be completed', but more like 'notes to my future self'.

morkalork• 3 years ago

Why is it that every product starts to evolve "productivity" features? Is it just a lazy way to keep juice feature release KPIs? Even my freaking keyboard app* added it. Why? So I can make tasks while making tasks?!

* https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-to-do-blog/...

LightBug1• 3 years ago

Wow ... you mean Google is acknowledging that Tasks actuallys exists?!

Such a basic productivity area has languished for a decade ...

m-p-3• 3 years ago

Fair enough, all these systems were implemented at different times for different reason, while achieving a similar goal. Unifying them behind a single system is a good thing. I'm happy to know that my tasks and reminders generated from Google Assistant will show up at one place, and one place only. No more guessing.

butz• 3 years ago

Imagine how surprised I was when I found out all of my old reminders from Google Keep quietly sitting in my Google Calendar. Nobody told me about any integration and for the longest I thought they were not synced. BTW, I'm still searching for a decent offline Android TODO app.

robk• 3 years ago

It still drives me insane on Ios that there's no way to share to Google Tasks. For years I've asked for this simple option as my main work flow is to share from the browser to tasks for things to revisit later.

TheCleric• 3 years ago

Yay, can't wait until they abandon or replace this in 2 years.

telotortium• 3 years ago

Since it's been almost a decade, I figure I can tell this story:

I was on the Calendar team at that time, and some project managers enlisted me to do some data analysis to determine if Tasks should be shut down in favor of reminders. At this time, there was no mobile app for Tasks - the only official mobile site was the basic HTML version for pre-iPhone smartphones. There were, however, several third-party mobile apps using the Tasks API. I was able to demonstrate that those apps, plus the official desktop client (inside Gmail), were responsible for a lot of monthly active users. So I guess Google has finally deduplicated by shutting down Reminders instead, which I think was the right decision. It was probably around 5 years ago or so that Google released an official Tasks mobile app.

nytesky• 3 years ago

Will task get its own web page and maybe support easier management thru the web, sub task, etc?

Google Calendar and Assistant Reminders Will Migrate to Google Tasks Soon

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