reminders and tasks in Google Calendar. what's the difference and what should you be using them for?
Find out in today's video. Hello, everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
And, up until recently, you had to make a hard choice between reminders and tasks. Yes, for the longest time you had to choose, do you want to use reminders on your Google Calendar or do you want to use tasks, but unfortunately Google Calendar didn't allow you to use both.
Well now you can. You can have both reminders and tasks on your calendar and I'm gonna show you the difference between the two.
Calendar Event
But let's actually add Events into the mix here just so we are clear on the differences between these three.
So in my example calendar here I've got one event, it's shaded here in blue, "lunch with Ted. " So I'm gonna receive a reminder if I have that enabled,
here you can see it's set for thirty minutes before. Of course, if I select the edit button I can add a location.
Here I got actually an add on added to my calendar where I can make it a zoom meeting or if you are using some other type of video conferencing tool. A fair amount of option within a calendar event, you can add guests of course to a calendar event.
But let's not spend too much time here, right an event is something where in most cases you have to be at a physical location or maybe it's a phone call, it's a meeting, it's some actual event of activity that you're engaged with. Now you'll notice on the previous day I actually have a reminder here, a reminder to, if I click on it to expand it "Pick up Todd from school".
Maybe there's an early dismissal and I need to pick up this child at 1 pm. So what's the difference from a reminder than an event?
Well, this might not necessarily have to do with a physical location, maybe I just want to remind myself to call someone or I wanna remind myself to send an email somewhere else.
Now it's going to remind me at a specific time, this one is assigned to 1 pm and I can check it off, so when I complete this task, I can say "Mark as done" and what's interesting here it's actually put it up here in the Monday you're probably wondering why has it done that? Well today happens to be Monday so although this was scheduled for Wednesday and I said I had completed it, that's where it's put it, here in that Monday just to track it if I want to.
Now I can go back and say "Mark as not done" but you see what has happened there and I want to show this in particular you can see that it adds it here back to the Monday where it was last, right we know that it was originally scheduled for the Wednesday so something to keep in mind is if you do check it off, it's going to go and keep track of it in the particular date that you checked it off when you checked it off. But if you undo it, it's not going to bring it back here or if it was an all day reminder, it's going to bring it back where it was last.
Grouping Reminders
So another thing that you're going to notice here and let's look at Monday again as an example, is that I have three all day reminders and then I have two specific reminders at 8 a.
m. One of the things that I don't appreciate about reminders and Google Keep is that they group them all together.
If I want to see what these three reminders are, I need to click on it and now I can see a breakout of those three reminders, I can tick them off one at a time, or delete or edit them but I don't actually have a way to auto expand them at least not in this view. Now if I do change it to, I believe it's the Daily view, no it's still gonna be there, it's still going to be all of those grouped together in that fashion.
So that's one of the things I don't like about reminders, that it continues to group them. Here at 8 am I've got to do what, I've got to go click on it and now I can find out what is exactly associated with that time.
Tasks
But you will notice that tasks behave differently.
Here I havea couple of tasks on the 16th on the Tuesday and although I have multiple tasks, it will not group them together, it'll actually treat them as separate items. Now tasks cannot be placed at a specific time so that's one of the biggest difference between reminders.
reminders can be either all day or at a specific time, but tasks will not have a time associated with that. It'll have a date associated with it, but not a specific time, if I wanna change that to the 17th I can add a description, I can add a little more detail
to this but it's always gonna appear at the top of the calendar, now for those of you who may have watched some of my previous videos, here on Simpletivity you will know that I recommend to a number of my clients to keep their to do list within their calendar because
View Tasks
they're spending so much time in their calendar anyhow, this also keeps your tasks in the forefront. They never go hidden no matter where I go or scroll as a part of my day, I'm always going to see those tasks upfront and of course it's pretty easy to just drag them to a different date or to drag them back as well.
Now you will also notice that you can view your tasks in a few additional ways. On the right hand side, in the recently redesigned Google Calendar, we have a tasks widget and if I open that up, you can see I have these tasks, along with some other tasks that I have here assigned.
The ones down below, here's a blank one lets get rid of that one. We don't need the blank test one there.
The ones down below you'll see don't have a date assigned. So you can have a number of tasks which are not assigned to a particular date but the ones above you can see, are the ones we see in the calendar to the left.
They are assigned to a particular date. If I go over here, let's check this "email Steve"
and I say Mark complete, it is going to cross it off up here so I can see it on the date, but you will also know if I expand the completed section it was also crossed it off down below as well. Sorry this wasn't the Steve one this was the Susan one, just for clarification, this was the Susan email so it's crossed off that task below there as well.
So you might like to view or to use this little task window because it can be very helpful to see all of your tasks in the same place and of course we don't always have tasks which are assigned to a particular date or time. So I'd love to hear from you next, How are you using reminders and/or tasks within Google Calendar?
Do you have a preference and what are some of the rules that you use when selecting the differences between these three? Be sure to let me know and share with others
in the comments down below. Thank you so much for watching today's video.
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Remember being productive does not need to be difficult, in fact it's very simple
