Last year, we had a little poll to see what the most requested feature was, and, as you might have guessed, it was “Integrate Google Calendar“. And it won by a huge margin!

Just to make sure I understood why it was so valuable, I then did lots of follow up calls with those of you who were kind enough to tolerate talking to me for 30 minutes 🙂

Fundamentally, it turns out it’s about making your Today list less overwhelming…

Here’s the new Due Date picker, that includes Google Calendar syncing:

By choosing to add some emails to Google Calendar, you get the benefit of:

  • Promote really important things to the calendar to be sure it’ll be done.
  • Reschedule ActiveInbox items from within Google Calendar, using the true 2-way sync.

A few provisos:

We’re only releasing this to the Beta channel for now, because:

  • We expect there to be bugs! This is a pretty big feature behind the scenes.
  • It’s shockingly ugly to look at. Ironically by design… We want to see how the feature gets used before baking it into something attractive.
  • It isn’t supported on mobile yet – that will come if the feature proves itself 🙂
  • We have a new feature to come: You’ll be able to take advantage of Google Calendar’s start-time (which ActiveInbox Due Dates don’t support) – ActiveInbox will keep items hidden on your Today list until their time has come, keeping your Today list focused just on things you can do right now.

Remi is actively working on it though, to get your requests built in 🙂

Install the Beta Channel

  1. Go to your own Chrome Extensions list (go to ‘More Tools’ then ‘Extensions’)
  2. Uninstall ActiveInbox
  3. Install the Beta channel

(If you want to switch back to the mainstream channel, uninstall ActiveInbox Beta, and then install the regular version from our website).

  

This was written by Andy Mitchell