How to Share Google Tasks and Increase your Team’s Productivity

You just had your gazillionth action item come up today. You’ll need to deal with it at some point, but you don’t have time now. So you put it into your digital task manager. Whew! It’s all captured so you won’t forget it. Your task management app is critical for staying organized and making sure everything crucial gets done. It’s the primary tool in your productivity system that makes you a superstar at follow-through and keeps the balls in the air.

If that sounds familiar, then you’ve probably experienced the frustration of wanting to share a task list with your spouse, assistant, or entire team. You instinctively recognize that if tracking tasks keeps you organized, then having a shared list of tasks with others will increase efficiency, keep everyone on the same page, and help reach your collective goals.

And your instincts are correct. According to a Frost & Sullivan study which surveyed decision makers in businesses across the world, effective collaboration in teams has a 36% positive impact on productivity and 29% positive impact on profitability.

Effective collaboration in teams has a 36% positive impact on productivity and 29% positive impact on profitability.

If you use Google Tasks, when you’ve tried to share your lists with others, you probably got stuck.  Don't worry though - you’re not alone, and there’s hope for finding collaborative productivity paradise!

Steps to share Google Task lists and collaborate with others

‍First, the bad news: It’s not possible to share lists directly in Google Tasks. Previously Google Tasks had an option to copy a list into an email and send it to someone else. The other person couldn’t collaborate on the list in real-time, but at least they could view a static version of your tasks. However, when Google updated Tasks in 2018, even this limited sharing functionality disappeared. Then Google brought back some minimal sharing in 2021, but now it’s only possible through Spaces in Google Chat. Everyone in that Space has the same access to those tasks. There’s no option to set different permission levels. And tasks are tied to that Space only. You still can’t share your personal task lists, forcing you to continue looking for an easy way to coordinate work together.

Now the good news: You can share your Google Tasks with your entire team by importing them into GQueues, which integrates with all the Google products you already use.

Follow these 3 steps below to collaborate on your task lists in real-time:

1. Sign in to GQueues using your Google Account
2. Create a team and add members with permissions you choose
3. Import the desired lists from Google Tasks

Team members will be notified of the newly shared lists and can start collaborating immediately.

Plus, you’ll get a ton of bonus functionality to keep you and your team organized. One major organizational benefit is getting a separate calendar in Google Calendar for each Team you set up in GQueues. This means you can have multiple Teams sharing tasks, all with their own shared calendar to keep everything clean and organized! 

A few other features you’ve probably been longing for that you get in GQueues: attachments, search, comments, tagging, and unlimited layers of subtasks. 

And unlike task lists in Spaces, in GQueues you can easily see an overview of tasks across all projects and filter for tasks based on criteria like due dates, assignments, and tags.

Some final cleanup

This is a one-time import from Google Tasks. Once you’ve moved your tasks to GQueues, you should delete (or at least ignore) the task lists in Google Tasks, since changes made by you and collaborators are only visible within GQueues.

Try sharing your tasks now and experience the gains from managing work collaboratively with your team!