You might be surprised to see that the Todoist calendar is in fact a Google Calendar. That’s because the app still (after many feature requests) doesn’t have a built-in calendar view. The way it works is by connecting it to your Google Calendar, and syncing your tasks from inside the app. This causes various issues.
First, syncing delays. If you like shuffling your tasks around like I do, trying out different ways of organising, Todoist won’t keep up. There is a delay (that can be pretty long) to refresh both the Todoist tasks list and the Google Calendar, it’s not efficient or user friendly at all.
Second, there is no way to check off an item from Google Calendar. If I have a task set for 10am on Friday and I’m done with it at 10:30am, then I’ll want to check it off. But when I planned for this task I set it to last for 1 hour, so now it’s still showing in my calendar. If I delete it, well it will be gone, it won’t count as done. So I have to go in Todoist and check it off, and this might conflict with the duration of the event in Google Calendar.
Third, it creates a mix of Google Calendar meeting events and Todoist tasks, which quickly becomes impossible to manage. I use Google Calendar at my office job, and my own app for my personal work. So I need 2 completely independent systems. Sure, I could log out of my office Google Calendar and login to my personal one, to then set up Todoist to sync with this one and not the other one, but it’s just a hassle. It would be much better if Todoist had its own dedicate calendar module.
TickTick has that, and it’s honestly the best thing since sliced bread. The TickTick calendar doesn’t use any external third party to integrate. It’s inside the app, and it won’t conflict with my Google Calendar from the office.
When I move a task around in my TickTick calendar, it gets updated instantly in the various lists across my account, there’s no delay. I can choose to have tasks set as 2 types of events in the calendar:
- Normal task: something to do on a given day but not at a given time.
- Events: something to do on a given day, at a given time, with a deadline.
Normal tasks show up at the top of the day in a separate section, and events display like in a normal calendar.