Using Google’s New #ToDo Service With the Pebble Time

Pebble Time with Michael

photoIn An Extremely Simple Way to Manage To-Dos on a Pebble Time I first mentioned the idea of using Google Calendar to manage To-Dos. It looks like Google has realized how handy this can be and has added a great improvement to their Calendar to better support task management. It’s now easier than ever to do so and it still works great with a Pebble Time.

In order to use this new capability, you will first need to enable this feature on your own Google Calendar. You do so by going to http://www.hashtagtodo.com. There you will find a very brief description of this new Calendar service and be able to enable it in your Google account.

After that, you’ll be ready to make use of the new To-Do service. To do so you can just create an entry in your Google Calendar and append the following hashtag, #todo, to the entry. Doing so will mark it as a To-Do rather than an appointment or event. Within a short time period after creating this entry you’ll notice that Google has modified it. It will now have a “[ ]” (a set of brackets) at the beginning. This forms a checkbox for indicating the completion of this To-Do.

In order to mark a To-Do as completed, all you need do is to edit the To-Do entry and place an “x” anywhere inside the checkbox brackets. A short time after you do so, Google will recognize that this To-Do has been completed and will cleanup the checkbox by removing any extra spaces that may be contained within it. If by the end of the day you haven’t marked a To-Do as completed, Google will automatically move it into the next day.

Another handy feature that Google provides with this service is a summary of all of your outstanding To-Dos. This is automatically created each day and put into your calendar as an All-Day entry. The Description field of this automatically generated calendar entry will contain a listing of all your open To-Dos and when they are due for completion.

As you can see in the photo I have continued with the practice of normally scheduling all of my To-Dos at 11:00 PM, as I mentioned in my An Extremely Simple Way to Manage To-Dos on a Pebble Time article. I still find it very handy, especially when using a Pebble Time, to have all the To-Dos grouped at the end of the day. This makes them very easy to display together in the Pebble Time Timeline. Of course, if you happen to have a To-Do that is really time=based and which is actually due at a particular time of day, you can specify that time instead of using 11:00 PM. You can even set a notification for that time-based To-Do. Again, I suggest you use 11:00 PM for all non-time-based To-Dos to keep them grouped together at the end of each day for ease in display in the Timeline.

If you use my technique you will encounter one little glitch in how Google handles uncompleted To-Dos. As mentioned above, at the end of each day Google will automatically push any uncompleted To-Do into the next day. However, the To-Do will be pushed into the next day as an All-Day event. Any time schedule associated with the pushed To-Do will be lost. Nevertheless, I find it pretty easy to just edit any pushed To-Dos and add back the 11:00-11:3oP M default time period I use for my To-Dos. In fact, I virtually never run into this situation since I almost always manage to mark all of a day’s To-Dos as completed before the end of that day.

So, if the approach of managing your To-Dos in a Google Calendar has appealed to you at all in the past, I think you’ll find it even easier and more convenient to do so now that Google has added this new #ToDo service. Thanks Google!

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