Megan Ellis / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Calendar is making it easy to block off time for working on a task.
- Users can quickly use tasks to mark themselves as busy and unavailable for other meetings.
- Availability should spread to Calendar users everywhere early next month.
Do you live your life through Google Calendar? Your days exist strung together as a series of meetings? There are worse ways to keep yourself organized, and Calendar certainly makes it easy to stay on top of our schedule even as we juggle devices throughout the day. But what do you do when you just need some time for yourself, whether that’s following up on something, playing with an idea, or just decompressing? Google Calendar is finally getting around to addressing just that kind of need.
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While you could always get away with just booking a meeting with yourself (or whatever your preferred Calendar hack was), Google’s now making setting aside time to work on a task an explicit Calendar feature.
To get started, you just create a new task, give it a name, and select how long you’ll need to work on it. While everyone will be able to create tasks like this, Workspace and Education users will also get to take advantage of Calendar’s DND setting, or choose to automatically decline any meeting requests that would overlap with the task.
Google Calendar and Google Tasks have been fleshing out their overlap for a while now, and these changes are a nice way to give tasks an important functionality upgrade in Calendar. Like we said, we’re sure plenty of users have already internalized their own preferred way of marking off time in their schedule, so maybe this feels a little underwhelming to some of you. To that, we say “give it a chance,” and we’re just happy to see Google eventually getting around to formally addressing those needs.
Calendar’s new tasks features started going live earlier this month, and should be hitting users everywhere by the beginning of December.
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