How To: View Your Google Tasks in ICal

I’ve had plently of experience with different task management services including Remember The Milk, Google Tasks, Toodledo, Checkvist, and Todoist. They all seem to have one thing in common: they don’t work exactly the way that I want them to. Most of my experience has been with either RTM or Google Tasks, with Google Tasks winning out the past year or so. I stepped back from RTM because of its lack of project manipulation and Google Calendar integration issues, something that Google Tasks solidly supports (Plus I’m a BIG google fanboy, so why not use another Google service).

One thing that has always irked me about Google Tasks, and really ALL task management services, is its ability to be integrated with ICal or other desktop clients. Ideally, I want to see my Google Tasks in my ICal/Mail todo list and calendar, allowing me to freely edit and synchronize back with the Google servers.

iGTasks allows you to synchronize the two for a price, but why would I pay for something that should be able to be easily done for free? A free alternative (almost) to this can be found by using the Producteev task management service. You can sync its service with Google Task and Google Calendar for free, and it seems to have the nice side effect of creating a few new calendars under your Google Calendar. These calendars will have ALL of your current Producteev tasks which in turn will have all of your Google Tasks if your choose to sync the services. This newly created calendar can then be added as a delegate in ICal, allowing you to at least view each of your tasks in calendar form.

Although this is a big leap, it’s definitely missing a few main things. For one, this new calendar shows up ONLY in the calendar view, not in the todo list sidebar. Secondly, you can delete the calendar entry for that task, but as far as I can see, it doesn’t have any effect on the actual task in Producteev or Google Tasks (so basically you still can’t edit a task).

In order to do this, you’ll first have to create an account on Producteev.

Make sure you don’t connect with one of the services at the bottom, instead, create your own account. If you make your own account, you will easily be able to link with the Producteev desktop app (this will allow you to edit/add tasks to Google Tasks). If you connect using one of the other services, there is no way to log in to the desktop app using those credentials.

Once you are at your landing page, click on “Workspace Administration” at the bottom left of the page. It should look something like this:

Next click on “Email / IM” found in the left navigation menu. At the bottom of that page, you should see two headings titled “Calendars” and “Google Tasks.”

Select “Connect” to connect those two services to Producteev. At this point, everything should be set up. You should be able to edit your account in ICal to add the newly created calendars. At least for me, the calendars were named “Aaron’s workspace – PDTV” and “My Workspace – PDTV”, and it seems like both of them are exactly the same as long as you don’t add another person to your workspace.

Aaron Foltz

How To: View Your Google Tasks in ICal

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