Google Calendar Integration: Recurring Events

It is possible that today you have found new items on your calendar that you did not have before ¹. We have published an update on the process of integrating the FacileThings calendar with Google Calendar that, as a novelty, allows you to keep the recurring Google events in sync.

Until now, recurring events of Google Calendar were not synchronized because, although they are displayed in the calendar based on the repetition patterns defined in the first event, they do not exist as such. This made it difficult to transform events into actionable items, which is what you need to manage in your GTD system.

We have designed an integration model that allows you to work with these recurring events in an effective way from the point of view of the GTD methodology.

Every time a recurring event is created in Google, the occurrences of the next three months are synchronized with FacileThings, turning the first one into an actionable item. That way you can work with the next action a la GTD, while having a complete view of your schedule in the coming months (the non-active occurrences can be seen in the special calendar views).

Only the first occurrence of a recurring event is a live action in FacileThings, the rest cannot be edited. If you need to modify an occurrence of the list other than the next one, you must do it in Google Calendar. The update will be synced to FacileThings.

As with the FacileThings own Routines, when you set that first occurrence as Done (or trash it), the next occurrence in the list will automatically become actionable. The Google occurrence list will also be synced again so you always have a real three-month planning window.

If you assign a Goal and/or Area of Focus to the active item in the sequence, subsequent items will be generated with the same Goal and Area of Focus.

Summarizing:

• When you create, update, or delete a sequence of recurring events in Google, it is synchronized with FacileThings so that you always have the same schedule in your GTD calendar (within three months).
• In FacileThings you only work with the first item of the sequence, as you would work with any other action in your GTD system, and any update will be synchronized with Google in the same way as any other event.

Let us know what you think! We are going to be a couple of weeks in a kind of beta phase, while simultaneously we will try to implement the same system with the recurring events of Outlook.

¹ It is possible that due to the previous lack of synchronization of recurring events, you have defined your own routines to compensate for it and now have duplicated tasks on your calendar that need to be cleaned up. If you have any questions about how to do it or need us to help you, open a support ticket and we will try to give you the best solution.