Task management in Google Workspace

Comparing by use case

My theories

The story about tasks in Google Workspace isn't good and never has been - I have some theories, see what you agree with and let me know on Currents!

Engineers just cannot be bothered

Many Google services are historically built by people passionate about solving problems that annoy them - think Google Maps. Perhaps nobody was sufficiently annoyed by the existing task solutions, or they were already good enough. I have a hard time believing that. I also doubt Google lets their engineers use whatever third-party service they like.

Nobody to buy

The "tasks" market is oversaturated with small niche products. It is easy to create simple "task" products and hard to differentiate them from another, let alone make customers pay for them - the only companies that have pulled off that trick have bundled storage space and subscriptions, like Evernote. Or they are really not task management but something related, like Kanban boards such as Trello or project management. Many of those are not suited to big companies with deep pockets, so they stay small.

While many people may swear by their own choice of task management app, there is no true leader in the field that Google could emulate or buy. By the same coin, the market may be too entrenched and fragmented.

Don't mess with the ecosystem

Finally, since there are so many little companies doing tasks, Google may not want to be the 800-pound gorilla and destroy all of them, especially if a solid task management is not a selling factor. Many small companies may be more important than having yet one more app to care about. Every big vendor must be careful not to squeeze out its marketplace, or there will be no marketplace.

I honestly don't think this will change in the short run, but we may yet be surprised. The components are okay-ish - if they were only more tightly integrated. It turns out that they have actually widely varying use cases, as I tried to point out in Tasks vs. Reminders. So the culprit that needs to get better is the Tasks app. That said, Google Workspace (especially Sheets) is so very versatile that you should be more than capable of throwing anything together that suits you, especially since you can use URLs to refer to anything in Google Workspace. Just be careful about potentially amazing third-party products like Roam. Thank you for reading!

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