This is something that is annoying me lately.
I love the idea of a calendar telling me when things are coming up that I need to do, regarding payments or bills coming in or even tasks I need to perform for business.
The problem with a calendar is that a calendar is not a project management tool, nor a todo list. I keep running into these situations where I see an event that is now a few days old, and have already forgotten whether I did it or not, so I have to go log in some place and check. There is no way to mark a calendar entry "done" as if it were a task.
Of course, task management and todo apps can have due dates and thus often have calendaring functions, but those tend to be isolated to just the calendar within the app, and not connected to my general use calendar like from Google or Zoho.
Things get even more complicated if multiple people are able to respond to calendar events on a general work/task calendar, in regards to knowing whether the thing was done, and what the notes are.
All this creates a situation where we have multiple calendars mixed with todo app mixed with notes app, and people lose their place not knowing what needs done or if someone else did it.
I'm also annoying by the fact that todo apps make for poor note-taking apps. Typically a todo is simply marked complete and then disappears. Very little attention seems to be given to the fact that I might need to record notes about this task and refer to it some time in the future, make a time entry, and track whether it was billed. This means I have to duplicate my todos into some other note-taking app so I have a history of work done with billing and time information.
So we have task apps that make for poor calendars and note-taking apps. A note-taking app that makes a poor calendar and task manager. A calendar that makes a poor task and note app, etc. I have to duplicate the functionality of each into each other app, which takes too much time. And on top of that they often make for poor time and billing tracking.
To top it all off, some companies try to be everything, but just end up doing everything mediocre. A dedicated note app is best at notes. A dedicated calendar is best at that, and dedicated project management tools are best at that. And naturally I have a dedicated billing app which is not a note, todo, or calendar app.
I wish there was a better balance of these primary tools, and that they worked very well not only for an individual, but for a team.
In general, I want to avoid Google, just don't like them, even if other people think gapps are great.
For right now though, I think I'm going to stop putting things that are "todo" on my calendar, even though it seems a good fit for them, because calendars make poor todo apps.
And don't get me started on notification systems, priority levels, data management, customer communications. Ugh. A billion apps out there and nobody can get it right yet.
I use Microsoft To-Do, which is great. I highly recommend it. Has it's own built in reminders and such so you don't have to put on a calendar. It's a very simple interface, and awesome sharing lists.
