Google Calendar Activities and Events: Which Should You Use?

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What’s the difference between a Google Calendar activity and event? Jack Wallen answers this puzzling question and helps you decide.

Image: Google

Do you use Google Calendar? I want. In fact, I rely on it every day to keep myself organized and keep going. Almost everything I add to my various Google calendars is in the form of events. But every now and then, a task is more able to meet my needs.

If you’ve ever considered events and activities, you’ve probably asked yourself, “What’s the difference?” Let me see if I can make this easy for you to understand.

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While both events and tasks show up on your calendar (and they may both work to suit your needs), they’re actually quite different characteristics. The difference between these two is very clear … if you use Google Calendar the way it was intended. In other words, if your Calendar is used to schedule meetings, events are meetings, and tasks are things you need to do.

But if you’re like me and you use Google Calendar as a means of organizing the tasks you need to do, the difference gets a bit confusing. This, of course, depends on the details you need to keep for a business. For example, I use Google Calendar to map every article I have to write for all of my clients. For those entries, I have to use Events. How come? Because many times I add notes to the activity, so I know exactly what I am doing. I’ll include search information, contacts, various links, downloads, and more. I can do this with events.

With activities, however, you are very limited in what you can add. In fact, an activity can only include a title, a date / time, a description and a category. Now, with a lot of the things I add to Google Calendar, a task is perfectly suited. However, I tend to choose events by default, simply because I find them more flexible.

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However, one of the nice things about tasks is that they stay on the calendar, never dimming (even if the set time has passed) until you mark them as completed. Once marked complete, a task will remain on your calendar, obscured like past events. You can also mark a task as incomplete to bring it back to the front.

So, consider events like Google Calendar daily bread and tasks like those little reminders of the things you need to do throughout the day. Once you have both events and tasks in your workflow, you will appreciate having them both with you.

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