Within the first half of 2023, Google started phasing out the Reminders characteristic of Google Calendar and Google Assistant. Google additionally integrated some Reminders performance into Google Duties.
Customers can now use Google Calendar and Google Assistant to create Duties as an alternative of Reminders. Duties could be set as much as embrace notifications (much like Reminders) that can alert them to a particular occasion, deadline, and so forth.
The consolidation might deal with among the ongoing complaints about points with app interoperability and inefficiencies with Google Reminders. The change ought to hopefully present a extra streamlined and intuitive person expertise for customers of the Google App suite.
What are Google Reminders?
Reminders had been alarms that notified customers of upcoming occasions, appointments, or to-do record gadgets. They included pop-ups and sounds, and had been set to go off at a time specified by the person.
Reminders is also set as much as be triggered upon the person’s arrival at a particular location. For instance, a person might set a Reminder like “Name mother after I get residence.” Then, they’d get a notification as quickly as they had been inside a sure radius of their home.
Previously, customers might create and think about reminders in Google Assistant, Google Calendar, Google Inbox, and Google Preserve. In Google Calendar, customers had the choice to see all of their Reminders slotted into the right dates and occasions.
The place Did Reminders Go?
If you happen to did not convert your Reminders your self, they need to have already got been transformed to Duties routinely, by Google. The one exception is reminders on Preserve, which is able to keep on Preserve, however will not present up in your Google Calendar anymore.
In June 2023, Google started eradicating information from the Reminders platform — however once more, all your information ought to’ve been safely migrated to Duties. The one exception right here is that if your group did not have Duties turned on. This would possibly imply information was left behind within the migration. If you happen to suppose this has occurred to you, your group must activate Google Takeout. Hopefully, you’ll export not less than a few of your outdated Reminders earlier than they’re deleted.
Now, you’ll entry your Reminders — now simply known as Duties — by way of the Duties panel. You possibly can open the panel out of your Gmail Inbox, Calendar, Google Drive, Chat, or any file in Docs, Sheets, or Slides.
To open Duties from these places, you merely click on the Duties icon — a blue circle with a test mark in it. You could find this to the best of the display screen in every of those workspaces.
You may as well add new Duties and Subtasks within the panel, and set a date and time for each. Setting a time will set off a notification that ought to seem in your Android telephone or telephone with Google apps. You may as well create and replace duties by voice, by way of Google Assistant.
The Activity app itself, when used from a browser, doesn’t present any notifications or variations when a Activity begins. For instance, when you set Duties to remind you of an occasion at 11 a.m., you may get a pop-up in your telephone at 11 a.m. However whatever the time, you will not see something change in your laptop computer display screen or within the Duties panel.
Execs of Changing Google Reminders to Google Duties
Accessible All through the Google System: As talked about earlier than, the transition partially resolves a long-standing problem of Reminders not being synced all through the Google ecosystem. Duties are accessible by way of just about any Google app and workspaces. And, like Reminders, they warn you when it is time to be someplace or get one thing achieved.
Drag and Drop Emails into Google Duties: With out opening it, you may click on on any e-mail in your Gmail inbox and drag it to the Duties panel. Duties will use the data to routinely generate a brand new activity. Sadly, it will not essentially populate the duty with pertinent data from the e-mail.
Useful for Managing Small Tasks and To-Dos: Duties are additionally helpful as a quite simple undertaking administration system. The Lists characteristic allows you to create a number of lists of Duties, so you may group your duties nonetheless you need. You may as well preserve work and private initiatives separate through the use of totally different lists. Subtasks aid you set up bigger work, family, or private initiatives into totally different steps you may tick off as you go.
Easy, Clear, and Simple-to-Use: The Duties interface is extraordinarily minimal and intuitive in order that it may be lots much less clunky than different undertaking administration techniques. It is also good to open the record in a number of totally different tabs of a browser. You do not have to toggle between tabs to see Duties when you’re working a Doc, your Calendar, and Gmail concurrently. Google Duties additionally integrates with a variety of different third-party apps.
Cons of Changing Google Reminders to Google Duties
Restricted Performance for Activity Administration: Although lovely in its simplicity, Duties is not a fantastic different to different organizational or undertaking administration platforms. It is because its performance is extraordinarily restricted. As an illustration, Duties does not provide the choice to generate deeper ranges of subtasks. In different phrases, you may break a Activity into a number of items, however you may’t break these items into smaller items. There’s additionally no technique to collapse subtasks to create a much less cluttered view. And with Duties, there is no longer a technique to set location-based reminders.
No Actual Collaboration Performance: In contrast to Reminders, you may’t assign a Activity to a different particular person. And Duties is not very helpful for managing any sort of crew or shared initiatives. It does not allow you to share lists, notes, or photographs with different individuals — in contrast to Google Preserve.
Complicated or Lacking Notifications: It is also irritating Duties does not generate a notification in your browser when a Activity with a chosen begin time begins. If you happen to’re working in your laptop computer and your different gadgets aren’t within the room for you, you are out of luck. Lack of notifications might result in missed conferences or essential appointments. If you happen to add a activity with a date and time to Duties, it will not be added routinely to Google Calendar. That is true even whenever you entry the Duties panel from an open Google Calendar tab.
Potential Lack of Knowledge: Customers who get their Google entry by way of work might discover their corporations weren’t ready for the transition. In case your employer hasn’t turned on Duties, your Reminders might’ve already been deleted within the migration. This might trigger a variety of frustration and, in some instances, a variety of misplaced work.
Potential Studying Curve: Lastly, one final con is that some customers might have some bother adjusting to the brand new system. Making the transition and understanding the variations between the 2 techniques is not as intuitive because it might be.
So Is the Transition Good or Unhealthy?
There are few actual variations between Reminders and Duties. It makes a variety of sense that Google would finally consolidate the 2. Duties has barely extra performance than Reminders in you can embrace extra data for every merchandise. However the two packages had been doing virtually precisely the identical factor all alongside.
For customers, the good thing about the transition shall be understanding precisely the place all the pieces is. And with Duties elevated performance — not less than over Reminders — customers can incorporate extra element of their notifications.
However the system nonetheless is not good. In an excellent world, you may select precisely the way you get notifications. Or they’d persistently present up on all of your gadgets to make sure you by no means miss something. Neither Duties nor Reminders was ever fairly adequate at persistently making good on its promise.
As for Duties itself, its best power is concurrently its best weak point. It is impossibly easy, which makes it extremely simple to make use of and handle. Nevertheless it simply does not have sufficient options to switch a fancy activity administration system like Trello, ClickUp, or Asana.
It’s potential to combine Duties with these and different undertaking administration apps. Nevertheless it’s unclear what the benefit could be or why a person would need to spend the time.
The place Duties does shine is as a easy digital substitute for a notepad or a stack of post-its. It is small and unobtrusive, along side your display screen, and it is extraordinarily fast and easy to seek the advice of and replace. It is also out there just about wherever you go along with any of your gadgets.
You possibly can’t make certain it’s going to bleep and buzz to maintain you on time for appointments. However you may by no means have to fret about forgetting your grocery record or crawl round in search of that scrap of notepaper.
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