Today, weâre excited to announce you can now attach a Google Calendar event to a task as a widget in Asana, and sync the title, description, and start/due date to your Google Calendar!
Click Customize in the top-right corner of the Asana project that youâd like to add this setting to, and navigate to Apps
Select Google Calendar, and navigate to the Data sync setting tab
Select the calendar for sync
Select the task fields that should be connected to event fields
Select Save and close to activate the setting
This update also allows for a one-way sync from Asana to Google Calendar when combined with the create event rule for Google Calendar. Itâs an excellent way to streamline your workflow!
Since it behaves slightly differently than I had assumed from my understanding of the doc, Iâll mention what I learned from so far from trying it in case itâs of value to others:
Although the postâs title is âone-way sync,â note that once an event is attached to a task, if you update the date/time in either GCal or Asana itâs syncâed to the otherâunexpectedly nice!
The one-way sync refers to the Asana rule action âCreate a calendar event.â Thatâs great, and I now have a My tasks rule to do this when triggered by changing a âDoâ dropdown custom field to âCreate GCal event.â I had assumed there would be a manual (non-rule-based) way to accomplish this, but thatâs not the case. Instead, the taskâs Google Caledar field (added by the app) offers the button âCreate Google Calendar eventâ which opens the Attach a Google Calendar Event dialog where you can search for an existing GCal event to attach to the task. So this also sets up the two-way sync described in (1.) above by manually connecting an existing task with an existing event.
Confusing? Clarifying? It all makes fine sense to me now, but again, wasnât exactly what I had assumed was being released. But pretty good news!
And this dropdown sure looks ready for an additional choice in there!
Hello @Richard_Sather To be honest I havenât found much time to try this out⊠yet
But as @Phil_Seeman says, this feature IS available also for Premium plans, so I canât wait to give it a go and see how it works Thank you @Phil_Seeman for the reply.
And thank you @lpb for all the extra useful info. Nice post!
Thanks for the addition! I was looking at how we could use this to sync existing monthly client calls in Google calendar to Asana and Iâm not sure itâs quite there yet⊠unless someone can give me pointers.
I added a test monthly calendar event in Google (repeats monthly on 3rd Tues). Then added the âclient X monthly meetingâ task in Asana that recurs every 4 weeks and linked the google calendar event. When I added a due date to the task (today), it changed the calendar event to be an all day event. I changed it back and tried to test if the next occurrence of the calendar invite would be added to the new Asana task once I completed this one. No dice.
At this point it seems helpful if youâre trying to create new calendar invites from a triggered action in Asana, but not really link existing ones. Does that seem accurate?
This is a super useful integration. I am very excited about it
I tried it out in the âmy tasksâ section; here are some questions/ insights/workarounds that came up while playing around with it - maybe someone has some insights that might help me or maybe my insights can help someone else
1. Can I create an event from a task manually?
â I have a bunch of tasks for which it makes sense to create a calendar event, but I wouldnât want a calendar event for all tasks within a project or a specific section of that project. Because the âshould be a calendar eventâ and the âshould not be a calendar eventâ-tasks are mixed within the different sections, it doesnât work for me to create a rule to automatically create an event once it moved into a specific section.
My workaround: Create a custom field âCalendar event needed?â with only one option: âCreate Google Calendar Eventâ, then add a rule that if this field is selected, a new calendar event is added. This works only for the âmy tasksâ section or in projects in which you can link the team calendar - it does not work for your private calendar within a shared project. So it would be nice to have an option to directly create an event out of a task and individually select the respective calendar. I am very open to ideas on how to create a workaround that works within a project that multiple people are working in and some of the tasks I would want to have only in my calendar and other people might want to have other tasks only in their calendar.
â the automatically created calendar event does not include the task description, only the title and date and collaborators (although description is one of the options in the synch-settings). When you update the text in the task (see next point), it will also update in the calendar event
2. How can I synch the information of a task and an existing calendar event?
I thought if I add an existing event to a task (through the respective field) the information of the task (due date, description etc.) would reflect in the attached calendar event. This seems not to be the case - you have to change something in the task (after attaching an existing calendar event) and only then the changes are reflected in the calendar event as well. Here are some of my learnings/observations:
the title of the original calendar event remains (-> if your task has a different name than the existing calendar event then the calendar event will continue to have its original title and not the asana task title)
if you have a task already filled with a description, due date etc. and then add an existing event, you will have to change the due date and/or time, as well as the description for it to reflect in the google calendar event (if you only change the due date in the asana task but do not touch the description, it will also only reflect the new due date in the calendar event while the description remains unchanged).
It is enough to simply press enter at the end of the description text in the asana task to count as a change, which is then reflected in the calendar event description - be aware tho, this will delete any of the original calendar event description and replace it with the asana task description
3. is there a way to automatically link the asana task in the calendar description?
If I have a rule in place that automatically creates a calendar event, it copies over the title, due date and (if applicable) collaborators to the calendar event and inserts a link of the asana task in the description field of the calendar event. If I then change anything in the description of the asana task, the linked calendar event is updated and now has the description of the asana task in the description field of the calendar event, but the asana task link is gone (as it has been replaced with the asna task description). It would be great to always have the asana task link in the calendar description to simply navigate to the respective asna task and make any changes there if necessary.
Hereâs a question - how are you all deciding which gCal to sync to, if youâre connecting the app to the project as a whole, how would I ensure that the events created for different tasks go to different peopleâs calendars? Or does it allow set up on a per Asana User basis? Iâm very interested in this, but donât want to set it up and then have everyoneâs stuff on my calendar.
Iâm so excited to see this! Iâve created an events calendar for our organization in Asana. I would love this to sync with a Google Calendar that we share externally. Is it possible to sync to that Google Calendar, or can it only sync to my personal calendar tied to my Asana account? (The personal calendar is the only one I see coming up when I go to the data sync setting tab.)
Thank you 
