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Todoist continues to be one of the most popular and full-featured to-do list managers available to you. But don't you hate switching back and forth between your task list and your personal calendar?
Well, in today's video, I want to show you how to set up a two-way sync between Google Calendar and Todoist. So that no matter where you are, you can stay on top of your tasks.
Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And you've probably heard me say in the past that I think it's important to manage as many tasks as possible, right here within your calendar. And the reason being is so that you can see your tasks on the same screen as all of your events.
Because, for example, if I take a look at my Wednesday here, I've got a number of meetings scheduled, maybe I can't do all of the things that I would like to do because of these events. And so I want to be able to see that and say to myself, "Yeah, I've got some more time here on the 14th, why don't I drag or move this task to the next day."
But the last thing I want to do is come back to Todoist, and go back and forth, and look at my calendar and come over here and do some of my work here, and then do some of my work over here in calendar. Well, that's where the Todoist integration with Google Calendar comes into place.
And the great thing about it is that it's not one-way; it's a two-way sync. So what does that mean? Well, let's take a look at this task here. It says, "email Max regarding a tax refund." It's here on the 13th. And if we go over here, you'll see, yeah, it's here on the 13th as well.
But when I'm in my calendar, let's say I want to push that over to Friday, because I don't have a lot on my plate on Friday. I'm going to click and drag it over there to the 15th. Now, I haven't left Google Calendar, but if I go back to Todoist, let's check out my Friday list. There it is, email Max regarding that tax refund.
And then if I'm perhaps here within Todoist and I say, you know what, I need to push this one here, this, "call Jenny about the HR conference." I'm going to push that to Friday as well, we're going to bump it from Thursday to the 15th. So here, you can see I've made that change here, of course, but let's go now to my calendar, and boom, in just a few seconds, it has pushed it over here to the 15th as well.
So no matter where I want to work, or where I happen to be at that moment, whether I'm here within Todoist, or if I'm here within Google Calendar, I can make those changes. I can even create brand new tasks right here from within Google Calendar, and they're going to show up in my inbox here within Todoist.
So let's take a look and see how you can set this up for yourself. To set up this integration, first, log in to your Todoist account. And then we want to come up here to the gear icon, and select Settings. Once we are on the Settings screen, we want to come down here on the left-hand side and select Integrations.
And here you should see the Google Calendar option; we have the ability here to select the Connect calendar button. Once selecting this button, we should get a pretty standard prompt that you've probably seen before where we want to be able to sign into Google. And here it's given me the choice as to which Google account I want to sign into, we have to give it some privileges here, so it can see what is going on. And of course, add and remove certain items from that calendar.
I'm going to select Allow here, which should take just a second here to connect to Google Calendar. And then this is perhaps the most important step right here in terms of what we want to label things within our calendar and some of the options here.
So first of all, it's going to say pick a calendar. Now by default, it's going to give us this option as Todoist new, but we could sync it with one of these other calendars here as well. So I'm gonna leave it at Todoist new because that's what I want it to see, that's what I want it to show within my calendar.
Now the next option here is what do we want it to sync, all projects, or just a specific project? And this may be key depending on if you want everything synced with your calendar, or maybe it's just a specific project within Todoist. I'm going to select all projects in this case.
Third option, tasks created on Google Calendar will go to, now our default option is inbox. But of course, you can choose a number of the other projects that you are working on here. I'm gonna leave it at inbox as the default. And in many cases, this may depend on what you choose for the sync up above. If you're choosing all projects, it's probably the best sense to leave that at inbox.
In terms of event duration, we can leave this at 60 minutes. If you don't have a duration set in Todoist, they're going to be listed as an all-day event. So this one, I don't typically use that often in terms of how things are set up within the Google Calendar site, so you can just leave that at the default of 60 minutes.
And task without a due time. Remember, many of them do not have a due time, should be synced as all-day events, or should not be synced at all. So you've got a lot of flexibility here. The difference here, just for clarification, is that if there is a due time, this is going to show up on your calendar in terms of an actual event, right? It's going to show up in the middle of the day, that only makes sense. If you have something due at noon, then it's going to show up there. But if you've left it as an all-day event, then it's going to show and appear at the top of our screen here.
Last two options here, what do we want to do when the task is completed? We want to leave it on Google Calendar, or remove it from Google Calendar. And again, this comes down to personal preference. I know a lot of you want things to be removed or taken away, you can do so as well.
And then the label added to Google Calendar tasks. So this is a way for Todoist to sort of keep track of what is going on within your events, I should say, here within Google Calendar. This is not nearly as important as some of the other options here. So you can most likely just leave it as GCal.
All right, here we're going to say Connect. And this may take just a few seconds here, it might take a few moments for that connection to happen the first way through. If you ever need to come back and customize those choices that we just made, you're going to have this option here to customize. We're going to see many of those options remain here again, so we can see that, we can make changes as we wish.
So let's close this, and on the Todoist side, we're not going to see much at all, right? Todoist is going to look exactly the same. But now let's go over to Google Calendar. So now that our sync has been successfully set up, here you can see in the all-day event area, I have my tasks, which are synced directly from Todoist.
Now I often recommend that you choose a more unique color, you can come in here, and I'll just pick something somewhat red-like, actually, I don't like that red, I like this red, there we go, Tomato, Tomato red is a lot more like Todoist. So again, you can see the differences between things that are being synced from your Todoist account, and maybe other actual all-day events, or other things that may appear here, or that will appear on your calendar.
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