Connecting Google Tasks with Google Calendar the silly way
I started trying to turn my Google Tasks into Calendar events the dumbest possible way: copying and pasting. Not even kidding. I’d have a weekly checklist—”Write blog post,” “Water plants,” “Follow up on that terrifying dentist bill”—all neatly in Google Tasks. But then I’d also make Calendar events by hand for when I wanted to do them. I’d forget. Things would overlap. I’d miss the plant watering again 😐.
There’s no built-in way to make a Google Task automatically appear as an event in Calendar. I assumed I was just missing some setting. Spoiler: I wasn’t. It really just doesn’t do it. Which is kind of ironic because both are Google products that live in the same Workspace, and yet they act like they’ve never met each other.
Using Apps Script when you really don’t want to
So the first real attempt was pure brute force through Google Apps Script. I found some basic examples online that looked promising, like:
“`javascript
function moveTasksToCalendar() {
var taskLists = Tasks.Tasklists.list();
for (var i = 0; i < taskLists.items.length; i++) {
var tasks = Tasks.Tasks.list(taskLists.items[i].id);
if (tasks.items) {
for (var j = 0; j < tasks.items.length; j++) {
var task = tasks.items[j];
if (task.due) {
var event = {
summary: task.title,
start: { dateTime: task.due },
end: { dateTime: task.due },
};
Calendar.Events.insert(event, "primary");
}
}
}
}
}
```
Problem is, this only worked *sometimes*. And when it failed, it didn’t tell me why. I kept getting odd nulls because the due date wasn’t always defined. Also, Google’s Advanced Services need to be enabled and that UI is buried in the script editor under 1.5 tons of menu options. I didn’t know until hour three.
Worst of all, it didn’t clean up after itself. If I re-ran the script, I got duplicate events. My calendar looked like a toddler spilled marker all over it. 😩
Trying Zapier before lunch and regretting it by dinner
So after wrecking my calendar with duplicates, I switched to Zapier, thinking: this should be simpler. Just catch a new task and create an event, how hard is that?
Except Zapier doesn’t support Google Tasks as a **trigger**. You can create a task, but you can’t react to one being made. Which sort of defeats the point unless you’re using Zapier to add the tasks in the first place.
Then I tried the schedule workaround. I had this convoluted system:
– Every hour, Zapier would search Google Tasks for tasks with a due date
– Then it would make a matching event on my calendar
It worked… until I realized:
1. It was repeating the same task every hour
2. Some tasks were missed if added between syncs
3. I hit my task quota before the week even ended 😵💫
I ended up writing logic in Zapier’s Formatter to parse out the task name, due date, and ditch duplicates. But duplicates still snuck in because the datetime formatting between Google Tasks and Calendar doesn’t match consistently. It would round to different levels of precision. Like, Tasks sends “2024-06-09T14:00:00.000Z” but Calendar needed only “2024-06-09T14:00:00Z” or something. Don’t quote me on that — I may have blacked out from rage.
Automating with Make but escaping barely intact
I finally turned to Make (formerly Integromat) — the one automation platform with Google Tasks **as a starting module**. I built a scenario with these steps:
1. **Watch Tasks** in the target list
2. **Filter** for tasks with a due date
3. **Create Event** in Google Calendar with the same due date
It looked clean… until I hit the rate limits. And then error messages started appearing that were barely in English. Half the response was like:
“`
[403] GoogleAPI: insufficient authentication token or invalid scope
“`
So I had to go back to the connections panel, regenerate the auth token, re-scope it (which means re-selecting what permissions Make gets), and re-publish the scenario. Which prompted a total OAuth reset which logged me out. 👍
Also, repeating tasks don’t work reliably. Google Tasks doesn’t expose the recurrence rule, so what you’d actually get was **every instance of a repeating task looks identical with the same ID**, and it’s hard to tell if something’s new or just rescheduled.
Using Tana as the middle ground that actually worked
Somewhere in the middle of screaming at my screen, I thought — what if I just used Tana as a central source of truth? Yep, that outliner-notebook app. Because honestly, it does more to track daily actions than Google Tasks ever did.
I wrote a simple webhook via Tana’s calendar view so each time I typed a line like:
“`
@todo Write landing page @due June 14 @calendar sync
“`
it shot a webhook to my make.com scenario, which parsed the string and gave me a properly formatted Google Calendar event. Task title became the event name. Due date went straight into start/end.
Totally janky. But actually reliable. No doubled entries. No guesswork. And seeing the event appear when I hit enter in Tana? Kinda magic. ✨
Workaround with Google Assistant voice memos
This one sounds ridiculous, but hear me out. If I said “Hey Google, remind me to email Sarah tomorrow at 2 p.m.,” it would **create a Calendar event**, not a Google Task.
But if I said, “Hey Google, add a task to email Sarah tomorrow,” it would land in Google Tasks quietly without a due date half the time.
So I just started using voice for time-bound events and Tasks list for stuff I could do any time. And that weird mental split actually fixed my overgrown task list. Sorta like:
– **Tasks** = flexible projects
– **Calendar** = hard appointments
Which is dumb because they could have just had a toggle or setting for it… but yeah 😅
Bugs when I renamed a Tasklist mid-sync
Here’s something real specific and very annoying. If you rename a Google Tasklist and you’ve got any automation pulling from it, you better update the Tasklist ID reference immediately. Because these systems don’t use the name. They use the unique Tasklist ID, which lives under the hood.
And that ID **doesn’t change** when you rename it — but apps like Zapier and Make may still reference your original name on the front-end. So what happened to me was:
– I renamed “Blog Content” to “Content Pipeline” in Google Tasks
– My Make scenario still ran
– But the data coming back said “`404 not found`”
Why? Because Make showed the **name** in the dropdown but continued using a cached version of the ID. I had to manually delete and reselect the task list in the module to force it to pull the new label.
So pro tip: do all naming first. Or expect chaos.
How I finally cleaned up all the calendar spam
After at least eight duplicate events for the same writing task, I wanted to just nuke it all and start over. So here’s what I did:
1. Opened Google Calendar on a desktop browser
2. Clicked the gear icon → **Trash**
3. Filtered by the date range and keywords
4. Bulk-deleted all the broken events from old Zaps and scripts
But here’s the kicker: some poorly formatted tasks had no title, and those showed up as blank events. So I had to manually scroll and delete those line by line.
And I still occasionally get ghost events that look like they’re synced but actually came from a past version of my flaky Zapier flow.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯