How to use Google Tasks: the complete 2026 guide

Google Tasks is the to-do list built into every Google account. It runs inside Gmail's sidebar, the Google Calendar side panel, a standalone web app at tasks.google.com, and a mobile app for iOS and Android. The product is free, ships with both personal Gmail and Google Workspace accounts, and supports lists, due dates with times, deadlines, one level of subtasks, recurring tasks, Google Drive attachments, and a tight connection to Google Calendar. It does not support task priority, labels, native list sharing, assignees on your own lists, rich-text notes, or multi-level subtask nesting.

What is Google Tasks?

Google Tasks is the default task manager bundled with every Google account, both personal Gmail and Workspace. Google stores your task data in the same account as your Drive, Calendar, and Contacts, billed and secured under one umbrella, with no separate signup.

Tasks runs in four places, and they are all the same list under the hood:

• Gmail sidebar on the web. Click the blue checkmark icon on the right rail to open the panel.
• Google Calendar side panel on the web. Same icon, same panel, same lists.
• The standalone web app at tasks.google.com. A full-page view of the same data.
• The mobile app for iOS and Android. Capture from your phone, sync to everything above.

Whatever you create in one surface appears in the others on the next sync. There is no separate "Tasks workspace" to switch between, and no premium tier to upgrade to. Google Tasks is the default to-do list bundled with every Google account, accessible from Gmail, Calendar, the web, and mobile.

The basics: capture, complete, lists

The core loop in Google Tasks is three actions: capture a task, organize it on a list, and check it off when done. Once you know where to click for each, you have the full product.

• Capture. Click the Tasks icon in any of the four surfaces above, hit Add a task, type a title, and optionally add details or a date and time. Press Enter to save. On mobile, the floating + button does the same. Once a task exists, the three-dot menu on each row exposes four actions: Add deadline (a date-only marker, separate from a timed due date), Add a subtask, Add attachment (a file from Google Drive), and Delete.
• Lists. Tasks groups everything into lists. The default list is My Tasks; create more from the dropdown at the top of the panel (Create new list). Use one list per context: Work, Personal, Reading list, Errands. You can drag tasks between lists from the standalone web app.
• Complete. Click the empty circle to the left of any task to mark it done. Completed tasks collapse under a Completed header at the bottom of the list, with a count next to it. To un-complete a task, expand the section and click the filled circle again.

Turn a Gmail email into a task

Google Tasks pulls directly from an open email, so a message that needs follow-up becomes a task without retyping anything. Once created, the task saves to your Google Tasks list, shows up in the Gmail side panel, and you can add a due date or other details right away.

• Click Add to Tasks. Open the email, then click Add to Tasks at the top. If you don't see it, open the More menu and choose Add to Tasks.
• Drag and drop. Open the Tasks side panel (the checkmark icon on the right of Gmail), then drag the email onto the panel.
• Press Shift+T. With Gmail keyboard shortcuts turned on, select an email and hit Shift+T to send it to Tasks in one keystroke.

Recurring tasks

Recurring tasks are the area where Google Tasks behaves differently from most to-do apps, and the difference matters. The setup is short: click a task in the list to open its detail panel, give it a date and time, then click Repeat and pick Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly, or Custom for an arbitrary interval. The recurrence saves as soon as you close the panel, and the next occurrence shows up on the chosen schedule.

The quirk: Google Tasks stores one task with a moving due date. It does not create a new task per occurrence. When you complete this Monday's "Weekly review," the same task's date advances to next Monday. There is no per-occurrence history, no log of "did I do this 4 weeks in a row," and no way to skip a single instance without skipping the whole pattern.

For most people this is fine. The current occurrence is what you need to act on, and the date advances reliably. For anyone tracking habit consistency or recurring deliverables across weeks, the missing history is real, which is why people who care about streaks typically reach for a dedicated habit tracker app or a Notion habit tracker template instead of trying to bend Google Tasks into one.

One more limit worth knowing before you rely on recurrence: a task with subtasks cannot repeat, per Google's own help page. Keep recurrence on parent-only tasks, or split the subtask out as its own task if you need the pattern to continue.

Google Tasks recurring tasks store one task with a moving due date; completing advances the date rather than creating a new task. If you need per-occurrence rows, mirror the task to a Notion database where each completion can become its own page.

Subtasks and list structure

Tasks supports subtasks one level deep and no further. There are three ways to add one:

• Indent it. Drag a task underneath the one that should be its parent, then press Ctrl+] (Cmd+] on Mac).
• Use the menu. Open the parent's three-dot Task options menu and choose Add a subtask.
• Use the shortcut. While editing the parent, press Ctrl+Alt+Return (Cmd+Option+Return on Mac).

The subtask appears indented under its parent and inherits nothing automatically (no due date, no notes); it is a free row that happens to be tied to a parent.

The hard rule: subtasks cannot have their own subtasks. Try to indent a subtask further and the UI does nothing. The limit is enforced by the Google Tasks API, not a UI choice, which means no Chrome extension, no third-party app, and no future Google update is likely to add depth without breaking the API contract. Google Tasks supports one level of subtask nesting. Subtasks cannot have their own subtasks.

If you need deeper structure (project → phase → task → subtask → checklist item), Google Tasks is not the tool. The two practical workarounds:

• Use a separate list per project phase, treating list names as the second level of nesting.
• Mirror tasks to Notion via a two-way sync, where the same parent-task relation can extend to any depth via Notion's own relation property.

Keyboard shortcuts worth learning

Press Ctrl+/ (Cmd+/ on Mac) inside any task list to pull up the full shortcut list. A handful cover most of what you'll do day to day:

• Enter to save a new task.
• Space to mark the selected task complete.
• Ctrl+] (Cmd+] on Mac) to indent a task under the one above it, turning it into a subtask.
• Ctrl+[ (Cmd+[ on Mac) to remove that indent.
• Ctrl+Alt+Return (Cmd+Option+Return on Mac) to add a subtask directly while editing the parent.
• Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z on Mac) to undo the last change.

Tasks in Google Calendar

Any Google Task with a date and a time appears on your Google Calendar grid as a time-blocked entry, color-distinguished from regular events (typically a lighter shade with a checkmark icon). Drag it on the grid to reschedule, and the new time syncs back to Tasks on the next cycle.

The Tasks side panel inside Calendar mirrors the Gmail sidebar exactly: the same lists, the same capture loop, the same recurrence options. If you live in Calendar all day, you do not need to leave it to manage tasks. Google Tasks with a time appear in Google Calendar as time-blocked entries you can drag to reschedule.

For the full walkthrough, adding and managing tasks on the grid, the tasks-versus-events distinction, recurring tasks, and why tasks sometimes fail to appear, see the dedicated guide to tasks in Google Calendar. For routing both tasks and events into a single Notion view, see how to sync Notion with Google Calendar for the calendar-side pairing.

Mobile and the iPhone widget

The Google Tasks mobile app for iOS and Android carries the same capture loop in a smaller surface. The two questions readers actually ask are how to install it and how to get a useful widget on the home screen.

• Install. Download Google Tasks from the App Store or Play Store. Sign in with the same Google account you use on the web, and your lists appear on the first launch. There is no separate Tasks account.
• iPhone widget. Long-press an empty area of the home screen until the icons jiggle, tap the + in the top-left corner, search Tasks, and pick the small or medium widget. The widget shows tasks from a single list at a time; tap the widget to switch lists in the app.
• Android widget. Long-press the home screen → Widgets → scroll to Tasks → drag the widget onto the home screen. Android exposes a slightly larger widget surface than iOS but the per-list limit is the same.

The honest limit: the iPhone widget shows one task list at a time; combining lists into a single widget view is not supported. If you keep separate Work and Personal lists, you keep separate widgets, or you collapse them into one list and lose the separation. Most users settle on a single mixed list on mobile and let context filters do the work on desktop. If those lists are already mirrored to a Notion database, the Notion mobile app gives you a single filtered view across all of them, and the widget constraint stops mattering.

Sharing workarounds

Google Tasks has no native sharing. You cannot share a list, assign a task to a teammate from inside Tasks, or see another user's tasks even within the same Workspace. The product is built as a personal tool and Google has not extended it in this direction.

The four workarounds that exist:

1. Assign via Google Chat spaces. Inside a Chat space, click the Tasks tab → Add space task → assign to a member. The task appears in that member's Google Tasks list, with the Chat space name as the list. Assignment in Chat needs a space; a direct message thread won't do.
2. Assign from a Google Doc. If you're signed in to an eligible Google Workspace account, you can assign a task to yourself or to someone else from inside a doc.
3. Mirror a list to a shared Notion database. Each teammate connects their own Google Tasks list to a shared Notion database via a two-way sync; the team sees everyone's tasks side by side, filtered and grouped however the Notion view dictates. The advantage over Chat or Docs assignment is that the assigner doesn't need to be in either app; the Notion view is the surface.
4. A single shared Google account. Multiple users log into the same Google account with shared credentials. Mentioned for completeness; this is not recommended (audit trail collapses, password rotation becomes painful, every change looks like it came from one person).

What Google Tasks can't do

Reading a Tasks guide that only covers the capabilities is reading half the picture. The limits are short, real, and the same in every surface.

• No task priority. No P1/P2/P3, no high/medium/low. You can star a task, and a list sorts by My order, Date, Deadline, Starred recently, or Title, but none of those is a priority level. Workaround: prefix titles with [P1], or maintain priority in Notion via field mapping.
• No labels or tags. No @home, @office, #errand. The closest substitute is separate lists, which act as a poor man's label.
• No assignees on personal tasks. Assignment happens in Chat spaces or, on eligible Workspace accounts, in Google Docs (both above), not on tasks you create in your own lists.
• No native list sharing. Covered in the sharing section.
• Notes are plain text only. No formatting, no checklists inside the note, no images. Attachments are supported via the per-task menu, but they appear next to the note rather than inside it; the note field itself stays plain text.
• One level of subtask nesting. Covered in the subtasks section.
• No project view, no Kanban, no Gantt. Tasks is a list, not a project manager. If you need any of those, you are looking at a different category of product.

Google Tasks does not support priority levels, labels, native list sharing, rich-text notes, or multi-level subtask nesting.

If most of these gaps matter to you, the choice is between switching tools entirely (see Todoist vs Google Tasks for the most common upgrade path, or the broader best to-do list apps and best planner apps roundups for the wider field) or layering Notion on top of Google Tasks so each app does what it does best. The next section covers the second option.

Bringing Google Tasks into Notion

Most Notion users hit the Google Tasks limits above (no priority, no labels, no native sharing) and end up wanting their tasks mirrored into a Notion database where every gap disappears. Capture stays in Google Tasks on mobile; Notion holds the structure (project relations, custom views, rollups, dashboards).

Notion has no native Google Tasks integration, so the connection runs through a third-party sync layer. 2sync is the most complete option: full two-way sync, 15 mapped fields, subtask hierarchy preserved through Notion relations, and recurring tasks handled with the same moving-date semantics Google Tasks uses natively.

For the full setup walkthrough, the 8-method comparison of every alternative (Pleexy, Zapier, Make, IFTTT, TaskClone, n8n, free DIY scripts), and the field-by-field reference, see How to sync Notion with Google Tasks. Hieronymus Machine is the closest customer story to this pattern.

Example of our Google Tasks already synced into Notion through 2sync.

Final thoughts

Google Tasks is the right tool for one job: fast capture into a flat list, with a tight tie to Gmail and Google Calendar. Its limits cap it as a standalone manager: no priority, no labels, no native sharing, no project view. Within its job it is dependable, free, and built into surfaces you already use every day.

The pragmatic stack for most Notion users is to keep Google Tasks as the capture layer and let Notion carry the structure. Each app does the work it does best, and a two-way sync keeps them aligned without manual copy-paste.

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