Combining Google Calendar events and task deadlines

There are two dishonest views of your week. The calendar view shows meetings and calls — and a Thursday that looks pleasantly open, because deadlines do not appear on calendars. The task view shows deadlines — and a to-do list that looks achievable, because it does not know Thursday is six hours of meetings. Every over-committed week starts with trusting one of these views alone.

Time and obligations are different data

A calendar event is allocated time: it has a start, an end, and (usually) other people. A task deadline is an obligation: it has a due moment and an unknown amount of work behind it. They cannot be merged into one kind of thing — a deadline is not an hour-long block — but they must be seen together, because they compete for the same finite week.

The practical test of any planning view: can you see, on one screen, that the proposal due Friday collides with a Thursday of back-to-back calls? If not, you will discover the collision on Thursday night.

Read-only is not a limitation — it is the design

A combined view does not need permission to change your calendar, and there are good reasons it should not have it:

• Authority stays in one place. Google Calendar remains the system of record for time; your task system remains the record for obligations. Tools that write to both eventually disagree with both.
• The blast radius of a bug is zero. A read-only integration cannot double-book you, cannot decline a meeting, cannot leak an edit to attendees.
• Consent is simpler. "This app can see your events" is a materially different grant from "this app can modify your calendar", and for planning, seeing is all that is required.

The same logic extends to multiple accounts: work and personal calendars viewed side by side, each remaining untouched at its source, with you choosing which calendars are visible at all.

A weekly planning pass that actually works

Fifteen minutes, ideally Friday afternoon or Monday morning:

1. Look at the shape of each day first — which days are dense with meetings, which have open blocks. Do not read the meeting titles yet; you are assessing capacity, not content.
2. Overlay the week's deadlines. Anything due on or right after a dense day is a risk. Move the work earlier, or renegotiate the date now — renegotiating on the due date is called being late.
3. Assign the open blocks deliberately. Deep work goes into the largest uninterrupted block, not into "sometime Thursday". Dense days get only small follow-ups: replies, reviews, five-minute closures.
4. Drag, don't rewrite. When a deadline must move, move it in the view and let it be recorded — a rescheduled date is honest planning; a silently ignored one is technical debt with feelings.

The daily glance

Each morning, one question against the combined view: what is due before tomorrow, and where are the gaps big enough to do it? That single glance catches the day the calendar and the task list would each have called fine.

Where DayMarshal fits — honestly

DayMarshal's calendar shows exactly this combination: your task due dates beside events from whichever Google calendars you select — multiple Google accounts supported, hourly week view and month view, drag-to-reschedule for your own tasks. The Google side is strictly read-only: events open in a detail view, but nothing can be created, edited, moved, or deleted at the source, and event details are read on demand rather than stored. Your calendar keeps its authority; your week finally tells the truth.