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.)
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.
Right, but I created a "Reminder" last year and when I go looking for it now, I'll be looking for something called a "Reminder" not a "Task"
I get that sometimes decisions have to be made about whether to keep or abandon design and UI and nomenclature decisions that are now regretted for whatever reason, but bear in mind that you are creating immense frustration for current users when you do so.
As the designer or manager or developer of an application, you are immersed in it and every change makes perfect sense to you. But your users may use it infrequently, or be invested in the way it works now, and all your changes are just seen as pointless, frustrating churn.
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.
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'.
Because Keep was released FIVE years before Task. And at the same rate, we are gonna have the same conversation in 5 years on why someone haven’t started using the new SuperDuperKeepTask service.
From the product POV, anyone who has ever used knowledge base will tell you that you should keep everything related to your data/ info in a single app. Spreading them out by any categorization is just inviting recall issue later on.
> Because Keep was released FIVE years before Task.
Tasks in GMail (and IIRC also Calendar) existed long before Google Keep. You are talking about the standalone application of Googles task-system which came with version 3(?). If anything, Google Keep is the problem here. Why was it duplicating features which were already existing in the Google-verse? Instead of integrating with the existing systems and improving them.
There is nothing wrong with spreading out your interfaces and workflows, as long as they all work on the same data. No interface is perfect, so having specialized interfaces for specific jobs is beneficial. But Google is not doing this with Keep, instead maintains another parallel system again.
> 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.
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.
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 .
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.
I'd argue it semi-intentional in the sense there's liitle error to fit it. Why? Because when the DOJ comes knocking with charges of monopoly Google can say, "Does this history and dumpster fire look like a monopoly to you?"
Their dysfunction is a form of self-defense (while search + ads keeps printing money).
> “Does this history and dumpster fire look like a monopoly to you?"
The obvious answer is “yes. Because that’s what happens when a company has no external pressure and can throw its monopoly weight around into unrelated markets.
Is this satire or super-insightful? I feel some sort of Poe's Law of Reality has been creeping in in the last ten-ish years [0]. Like this post is silly and funny, but I find it somewhat plausible too (at least as far as a reductive explanation of the behaviour of a huge corporation can be).
We all know what Google's bread & butter is. They are going to defend that. Full stop. To think it can't take some form outside typical expectations is simply naive given the numbers involved.
We're not taking about your child's lemonade stand. We're talking about a corporation that is by all accounts intentional. Why is this seen as "no way"? Doesn't that make it all the more possible?
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.
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.
Confusion was probably the point; they wanted the good will associated with the old name (and if possible, migrate the users over to bootstrap the new thing), even if doing so would destroy that.
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.
Google still famously uses a monorepo. With lots of heavy set-built tooling, their own variant of Bazel for builds, it works well. I imagine a lot of engineering effort goes into making it work.
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.
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.
I'm not sure we're actually that far off technically from getting the _kind_ of automation that Star Trek computer can do, we're just trying to get our voice assistants to do a ton of other crap that the Star Trek computer doesn't have to worry about on the business level.
Star Trek computer has no idea about advertisements/search optimization, etc, it's more like a helpful shell/magic talking box in most cases. If the Star Trek doesn't understand the request or can't complete it as requested, it prompts the user for more details or parameters and lets you know what you didn't give it. Similarly, the way we see interactions with the computer in TNG is that you define a task for the computer and the computer further defines business rules until it can start a workflow. It's not trying to push you towards a specific source of information or a specific outcome, it's just trying to define the rules to take your input and get the desired output.
AI-based control systems like this need to be established like we'd have a library or framework or protocol first, something that is just built for accomplishing tasks and refining that to a point that it is a workhorse. When it comes to subjective matters, it needs to not try to build a profile on what you want and predict it, it needs to be painfully obtuse in its objectivity.
Even on Star Trek, the computer struggled with matters of personal taste/entertainment even though it could ingest complex technical requirements and write equally or more complex workflows/code on the fly for specific tasks. It was pretty often with things like the holodeck or even just playing music/games to pass the time the computer didn't understand what the requestor meant and even though it produced an output, the output had to be refined a lot in fairly specific terms. Even something like shopping was still pretty manual, just piecing through a catalog of items to replicate was seen many times. The point is that the Star Trek computer was optimized for specific workloads and shined there, and stayed out of the way for absolutely everything else. I'm don't have hope that modern tech companies have the discipline to design something like this.
AI and smart homes I think lack a lot of focus and polish, trying to be way too much at once and also return further revenue for the businesses with ad-tech; I don't have any hope that modern tech companies are going to be the smart-home revolution as much as FOSS will, but that of course has the chicken and egg problem of finding hardware that will actually work with FOSS smart-homes; I'll gladly side with Stallman on this one and position that if the entire stack was truly free, then we would see innovation and closer to Star Trek style smart homes since you could buy any smart-object and just run free software on it that meets your needs. But I don't have hope that any tech company has a desire or interest in this, and personally I cannot get invested in anything from the major tech companies as it's just going to be obsolete in a few years and the services will stop working; Google has demonstrated this with far too many projects, and even Apple struggles to get its smart-object integrations to stick (I think one of the major car manufacturers dropped CarPlay for their new vehicles going forward?) It's hard for me to be excited or interested in smart-anything as I don't have the confidence I can rely on it for more than a year or two.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
Not completely. Inbox bundles and few other of the best aspects never made it across. I know because I had a painful period of adjustment when Inbox shut down.
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.
No, reminders are a separate type of item that can go on your google calendar, different from an event, not related to upcoming event notifications. You can tell it's a reminder because it has a finger knot icon and keeps rolls over to the next day unless you click "done" on it.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
> Regarding trigger i meant there is no standard scheduled system like a cronjob
Do you have a Mac? If so maybe you could run your shortcut periodically from cron on the Mac.
I just tested and shortcuts can be run from cron (once you get cron working...[1]). For example I have a bunch of shortcuts that do things to my Denon A/V receiver, and added a crontab entry to run the one that mutes the receiver, and it worked. You can invoke shortcuts with the "shortcuts" command. E.g., here was my mute test's crontab line:
*/1 * * * * shortcuts "Denon Mute On"
That doesn't involve interacting with any GUI apps (it just uses the "Run script over SSH" shortcut action to run a script that is on my RPi that does the actual work of dealing with the Denon receiver's network API). To check that dealing with GUI apps was OK from cron I tried another shortcut I have, "SaveInnerHTML" that saves document.documentElement.innerHTML from the active Safari tab into a file. That worked too.
[1] Apparently sometime around Catalina, when they were beefing up the permissions system and privacy protection cron stopped working unless you gave it permissions. You apparently now have to go into the "Privacy & Security" settings and /usr/sbin/cron full disk access.
Personal automations are pretty close. I use them to run shortcuts at specific times.
If you wanted to run a Shortcut hourly from, say, 7 am to 7 pm, you could manually create those 13 automations or maybe you could use Jellycuts to create one and then cut-and-paste it to make the other 12.
Edit: I just searched for it and here’s an article that talks about a cron-like Shortcut:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This setup works well for making any calendar host (fastmail, nextcloud, anything with caldav) work identically to native Google Calendar:
> Android does not support CalDAV natively, however you can easily add support by installing a CalDAV sync adapter. We have tested and recommend DAVx⁵, which is approximately $5. Once you have added your account in DAVx⁵, you can use the native Android calendar or any other calendar app and the changes will sync with Fastmail.
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?!
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.)