Hey :)
There’s a good chance your to-do list is making you less productive, not more.
I know that sounds backwards. You’ve got everything written down. You’re organised. You’re on top of it. But if you’re running your day from a task list — opening it up in the morning, scanning what’s on it, picking something off, and getting going — you’re working from the wrong place.
The to-do list is where you capture things. It’s not where you work.
I’ve been refining this system for years, and recently I’ve found a way to make it work entirely within Google Workspace. If you’re already there — Gmail, Calendar, Chat, the whole ecosystem — I want to make the case for why Google Tasks deserves your attention, and why the way you use it matters more than the app itself.
There’s a good chance your to-do list is making you less productive, not more.
I know that sounds backwards. You’ve got everything written down. You’re organised. You’re on top of it. But if you’re running your day from a task list — opening it up in the morning, scanning what’s on it, picking something off, and getting going — you’re working from the wrong place.
The to-do list is where you capture things. It’s not where you work.
I’ve been refining this system for years, and recently I’ve found a way to make it work entirely within Google Workspace. If you’re already there — Gmail, Calendar, Chat, the whole ecosystem — I want to make the case for why Google Tasks deserves your attention, and why the way you use it matters more than the app itself.
The shift that changes everything
Here’s the thing about a to-do list: it has no sense of time. It’s just a pile. And piles don’t tell you whether you can actually do everything on them today. They don’t tell you how long things will take. They don’t help you make real decisions about what matters most right now. They just sit there, growing.
You don’t work from your to-do list. You plan from it.
The list is where you capture everything — tasks, follow-ups, things you can’t forget. That’s its job and it does it well. But once you’ve planned your day or your week, you should close it. Your actual working life should happen in your calendar.
If it’s not on your calendar, it doesn’t really exist yet. It’s just an intention.
You don’t work from your to-do list. You plan from it.
The list is where you capture everything — tasks, follow-ups, things you can’t forget. That’s its job and it does it well. But once you’ve planned your day or your week, you should close it. Your actual working life should happen in your calendar.
If it’s not on your calendar, it doesn’t really exist yet. It’s just an intention.
Why Google Tasks is worth your time
I used to use Sunsama for this — genuinely great app, I still pay for it — because it gave me a structured way to drag tasks onto my calendar and plan my day properly. The system works, and I’d recommend it to anyone who wants more guidance through the process.
But I’ve internalised the logic well enough now that I don’t need the scaffolding. And when I looked at what I was actually doing, I was living in Google Calendar already. I just needed the task layer to sit right inside it.
That’s when Google Tasks started to click for me.
Here’s what makes it work: you can take a task and place it directly onto your calendar, at the exact time you want to do it. That sounds simple. The implications aren’t.
A task and a calendar event behave differently.
When an event passes, your calendar greys it out — time moved on, it’s in the past, whether you did the thing or not. A task stays incomplete until you actually mark it done. It doesn’t care that the day came and went. It sits there, visible, until you deal with it or consciously decide not to.
That’s a meaningful distinction if you’re trying not to lose sight of what actually matters.
But I’ve internalised the logic well enough now that I don’t need the scaffolding. And when I looked at what I was actually doing, I was living in Google Calendar already. I just needed the task layer to sit right inside it.
That’s when Google Tasks started to click for me.
Here’s what makes it work: you can take a task and place it directly onto your calendar, at the exact time you want to do it. That sounds simple. The implications aren’t.
A task and a calendar event behave differently.
When an event passes, your calendar greys it out — time moved on, it’s in the past, whether you did the thing or not. A task stays incomplete until you actually mark it done. It doesn’t care that the day came and went. It sits there, visible, until you deal with it or consciously decide not to.
That’s a meaningful distinction if you’re trying not to lose sight of what actually matters.
The email-to-task move
One of the most practical things Google Tasks does is let you turn an email into a task with one click. This sounds small. It’s not.
I have a loose philosophy with email — I’ve written about inbox zero before, and for me that’s always meant zero *time* in the inbox, not necessarily zero emails. The inbox is a bad place to live. But important emails do land, and they can’t all be replied to in two minutes.
So I use what I call inbound triage. I don’t have email open all day — that’s just a distraction. When I do check it, I sort quickly. Short replies get done on the spot. Anything that needs real thought, a longer response, or a conversation with someone on the team — that becomes a task.
I had a good example of this recently. Someone sent me an email with four or five detailed questions, each needing a proper answer — paragraphs, not sentences. I knew it was going to take time to do it well. So I turned it into a task, put it on my calendar for a slot I could actually commit to, dictated a first draft using WisprFlow, edited it, and sent it.
Without that move, that email sits in my inbox, gets buried under new arrivals, and I’m chasing it a week later. With it, the decision is made the moment I see the email. I’m just executing the plan.
I have a loose philosophy with email — I’ve written about inbox zero before, and for me that’s always meant zero *time* in the inbox, not necessarily zero emails. The inbox is a bad place to live. But important emails do land, and they can’t all be replied to in two minutes.
So I use what I call inbound triage. I don’t have email open all day — that’s just a distraction. When I do check it, I sort quickly. Short replies get done on the spot. Anything that needs real thought, a longer response, or a conversation with someone on the team — that becomes a task.
I had a good example of this recently. Someone sent me an email with four or five detailed questions, each needing a proper answer — paragraphs, not sentences. I knew it was going to take time to do it well. So I turned it into a task, put it on my calendar for a slot I could actually commit to, dictated a first draft using WisprFlow, edited it, and sent it.
Without that move, that email sits in my inbox, gets buried under new arrivals, and I’m chasing it a week later. With it, the decision is made the moment I see the email. I’m just executing the plan.
The integration that makes it worth staying in one ecosystem
If you’re already in Google Workspace, there’s a real argument for letting Tasks be the connective tissue across everything you’ve got.
It integrates with Gmail, obviously. But it also connects to Google Chat. If something comes up in a team conversation — someone mentions a follow-up, or you need to action something from a discussion — you can turn it into a task right there. Assign it to yourself or assign it to someone else. Those tasks feed into your list, you schedule them onto your calendar, and they’re part of the plan.
One ecosystem. One view. No context switching.
I think about tool sprawl more than most people probably do, and my instinct is always to remove things rather than add them. Before we add something new, the question should be: what does this give us that we don’t already have? If the answer isn’t clear, I’d rather keep things simple. Every new tool is overhead — something to learn, to maintain, to remember to check.
We use Fizzy (from the 37Signals team — here’s a link to my piece on that) for project management, and it earns its place (We left Basecamp in 2025). But the individual tasks that come out of those projects? They end up on my calendar, via Tasks. The applications do different jobs.
It integrates with Gmail, obviously. But it also connects to Google Chat. If something comes up in a team conversation — someone mentions a follow-up, or you need to action something from a discussion — you can turn it into a task right there. Assign it to yourself or assign it to someone else. Those tasks feed into your list, you schedule them onto your calendar, and they’re part of the plan.
One ecosystem. One view. No context switching.
I think about tool sprawl more than most people probably do, and my instinct is always to remove things rather than add them. Before we add something new, the question should be: what does this give us that we don’t already have? If the answer isn’t clear, I’d rather keep things simple. Every new tool is overhead — something to learn, to maintain, to remember to check.
We use Fizzy (from the 37Signals team — here’s a link to my piece on that) for project management, and it earns its place (We left Basecamp in 2025). But the individual tasks that come out of those projects? They end up on my calendar, via Tasks. The applications do different jobs.
How I decide what goes where
When you’re scheduling tasks, how do you decide when and in what order? The short answer: strategy, energy, and honest self-assessment.
Strategy is the first filter. If you know what you’re actually trying to achieve right now — really know it — you’ve got a lens for every task. Does this move the needle on what matters most? A lot of stuff that feels urgent fails that test quickly. I zoom in and out between strategy and today’s task list constantly. It’s a useful check.
Energy is the other big one, and mine has been consistent for years. My best, most focused work happens in the morning. Meetings, admin, client coaching sessions — afternoons. Every time I try to do deep creative work in the afternoon, it doesn’t happen. Every time I put a meeting in the morning, I resent it. The pattern is clear enough that I’ve stopped fighting it.
Figure out your own version. Once you know it, apply it consistently. Front-load the most important work. Match the task to the time of day when you’ve actually got the energy to do it well.
Then there’s honest self-assessment. Is this something I should actually be doing? Could someone on the team take 60, 70, 80% of this off my plate? Am I doing this because it matters, or because it’s comfortable?
And here’s a rule I’d encourage you to try: every 60 to 90 days, delete any emails that have been sitting in your inbox untouched, and delete any tasks on your list that have been there just as long. If it hasn’t been done in 60 days, it wasn’t a priority. If it genuinely matters, it’ll come back when it’s actually urgent. Being ruthlessly honest about this is one of the most clarifying things you can do.
Strategy is the first filter. If you know what you’re actually trying to achieve right now — really know it — you’ve got a lens for every task. Does this move the needle on what matters most? A lot of stuff that feels urgent fails that test quickly. I zoom in and out between strategy and today’s task list constantly. It’s a useful check.
Energy is the other big one, and mine has been consistent for years. My best, most focused work happens in the morning. Meetings, admin, client coaching sessions — afternoons. Every time I try to do deep creative work in the afternoon, it doesn’t happen. Every time I put a meeting in the morning, I resent it. The pattern is clear enough that I’ve stopped fighting it.
Figure out your own version. Once you know it, apply it consistently. Front-load the most important work. Match the task to the time of day when you’ve actually got the energy to do it well.
Then there’s honest self-assessment. Is this something I should actually be doing? Could someone on the team take 60, 70, 80% of this off my plate? Am I doing this because it matters, or because it’s comfortable?
And here’s a rule I’d encourage you to try: every 60 to 90 days, delete any emails that have been sitting in your inbox untouched, and delete any tasks on your list that have been there just as long. If it hasn’t been done in 60 days, it wasn’t a priority. If it genuinely matters, it’ll come back when it’s actually urgent. Being ruthlessly honest about this is one of the most clarifying things you can do.
This is about more than productivity
I want to be straight: this isn’t just about getting more done. It’s about mental space.
There’s something exhausting about living in a system that makes you feel perpetually behind. The to-do list that never gets shorter. The inbox that keeps filling up. The calendar that’s full of things you half-attended while thinking about everything else. A lot of people are in that mode, and it’s genuinely draining.
Getting your tasks onto your calendar — and then living in your calendar — changes the quality of your attention. You know what you’re doing and when. You’ve already made the decisions. When it’s time to do the work, you just do the work.
There’s a bigger thing underneath this too, which I’ll come back to in a separate piece: I think the world is shifting towards a more qualitative way of working. The question is less about how much you can produce, and more about how good you can make the work that actually matters. The task system, the calendar, the ecosystem — it’s all in service of that.
If you’re in Google Workspace and you’re not using Tasks, give it a proper go. Not as another thing to manage, but as the connective tissue between everything you’ve already got.
Start simple: next time an email lands that you can’t deal with right now, turn it into a task. Put that task on your calendar for when you actually can deal with it. See how it feels to have the decision already made.
That’s the whole game, really. Your to-do list is a capture tool. Your calendar is where you live. The mission — and it is a mission, one worth taking seriously — is to get everything that matters into your calendar, and then work from there. Not from your inbox, not from your task list, not from a Kanban board. From your calendar.
When you do that consistently, something shifts. You stop reacting and start executing. You stop feeling behind and start feeling in control. That’s what I want for myself, and it’s what I want for everyone on my team.
Live in your calendar.
🗣️👀
Chris.
There’s something exhausting about living in a system that makes you feel perpetually behind. The to-do list that never gets shorter. The inbox that keeps filling up. The calendar that’s full of things you half-attended while thinking about everything else. A lot of people are in that mode, and it’s genuinely draining.
Getting your tasks onto your calendar — and then living in your calendar — changes the quality of your attention. You know what you’re doing and when. You’ve already made the decisions. When it’s time to do the work, you just do the work.
There’s a bigger thing underneath this too, which I’ll come back to in a separate piece: I think the world is shifting towards a more qualitative way of working. The question is less about how much you can produce, and more about how good you can make the work that actually matters. The task system, the calendar, the ecosystem — it’s all in service of that.
If you’re in Google Workspace and you’re not using Tasks, give it a proper go. Not as another thing to manage, but as the connective tissue between everything you’ve already got.
Start simple: next time an email lands that you can’t deal with right now, turn it into a task. Put that task on your calendar for when you actually can deal with it. See how it feels to have the decision already made.
That’s the whole game, really. Your to-do list is a capture tool. Your calendar is where you live. The mission — and it is a mission, one worth taking seriously — is to get everything that matters into your calendar, and then work from there. Not from your inbox, not from your task list, not from a Kanban board. From your calendar.
When you do that consistently, something shifts. You stop reacting and start executing. You stop feeling behind and start feeling in control. That’s what I want for myself, and it’s what I want for everyone on my team.
Live in your calendar.
🗣️👀
Chris.