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Google Simple Tasks

The what

The Google Simple Tasks plugin was created for my personal use to automatically (or manually) one-way sync Google Tasks to Obsidian and to (manually) send locally created tasks from Obsidian to Google Tasks.

It all began in July of 2025 when I created my first personal Obsidian plugin that I called Add to Google Tasks. The plugin let me create a standard, markdown checkbox “task” in Obsidian and send it to any of my Google Tasks lists via a hotkey. Once sent, the task disappeared from wherever I had added it locally and showed up the correct list in Google Tasks.

Like many do, I started with the Obsidian sample plugin available on GitHub. I had additional help from claude.ai, who, while saving me some time, also frequently frustrated me by randomly rewriting my perfectly working code (cheeky bot). I developed the plugin for use with the desktop version of Obsidian on Mac OS. In my particular case, I am on the latest beta version and have the basic Catalyst license which gives access to beta app versions and Obsidian Bases.

After creating Add to Google Tasks, I decided to go on to create a two-way syncing plugin which I initially called Google Tasks Aller-Retour, designed to work independently from the first plugin. While it ended up working pretty well, there were issues with timing and delays that made me nervous about which location was up to date. After messing with it for a month, I decided that I would let Google Tasks be the “source of truth” for managing the actual tasks, so I added the first plugin to this newer version, changed the sync to create individual task “notes” (rather than the original one note for each list) and renamed it Google Simple Tasks. It would still allow me to capture local tasks but not worry about accidentally overwriting or missing changes as was sometimes the case in the original two-way sync.

The why

What motivated me to create this revised version of my original two plugins was the move to Obsidian from ClickUp and Notion, and a desire to stop paying for external task managers. I needed a simple way to turn emails into tasks, since that is where most of my tasks began, but I also wanted to be able to create tasks locally and add them to my different Google Tasks lists.

After years of using third-party task managers, I found that Google Tasks had gotten pretty good – an email becomes a task with a simple click, without adding plugins to Gmail. And the Google Tasks page view also lets you arrange lists in a kanban-like setting and drag and drop tasks (active, billable, etc.) between lists. Pretty simple. I was not time-tracking my work, nor do I collaborate with other workers, so most popular task managers were overkill for me.

So… in September 2025, after a lot of experimenting and learning, Google Simple Tasks was “reborn”. We’ll see where it goes from here.