Checkbox Workaround Solution for Google Calendar - Desktop & Android

Today I solved a computer problem that I've been struggling with for 6+ months. It's a bit convoluted and it is not perfect, but that's because What I Really Want To Do is not possible (see here, here, here, sorta here, and here).

If I were really hardcore, I'd add photos. But. Well. I didn't.

Sue me.

I am really motivated by check boxes. In fact, that is why Nike Run Club worked for me (until I got a very mild case of plantar fasciitis from running too much too quickly in a new pair of shoes). I guess maybe the check boxes worked too well, in that case - causing me to care more about checking them off than listening to my body. Or maybe there were other compounding factors like major amounts of stress. Who knows.

I like check boxes.

As of January 2020, Google Calendar for desktop has three things: events, reminders, and tasks.

Reminders and Tasks are useless for me because neither of them do persistent notifications on my phone. The ONLY way that I sometimes remember to do stuff is because my phone dings, or I look down at the notifications bar and POOF there's a reminder.

Google Calendar for mobile also has this extra thing called goals. It's great! But very lite - not customizable enough for some of my events. It has this great feature where you can mark it as complete or say "later." Supposedly the algorithm learns from you what times are the best for accomplishing your goal, and it will schedule future instances then. So that's cool. But it's obviously not useful for every kind of task, especially those that are not in 15 minute increments and that have rigid start times.

Basically, Events was the only option that I was left with. But events do not allow you to mark them as complete. I guess people just assume that if you had an event, you complete it.

Well. That's not how I use Google Calendar. And it's also not how I am motivated to do stuff.

So here's my workaround using the "Going? Yes/no/maybe" feature.

1. Use a dummy google account (you probably have one if you're anything like most people). For clarity's sake, I'm calling the main account in my example mainAccount@gmail.com and my dummy account dummyAccount@gmail.com.

2. In your mainAccount, on Google Calendar you will have three calendars: Events, Reminders, Tasks. Set up at least one other calendar.

(FYI: I have like 20+ calendars. All 5 of my kids gets their own individual calendar, there's calendars for home/family, church, school, personal, blogging, etc. The calendars are all color-coded. It's kind of nice to do it this way because I can see visually at a glance whether or not I need to calendar in more or less time in a certain area of my life. It has helped me to stay more balanced. "Oh, there's not enough time with Danny. We should calendar something this week." "Oh, I've got way too many things planned for school. I should try to adjust that in the future.")

3. In your Android phone, add both your mainAccount and your dummyAccount as users. When you open the Google Calendar app on your phone, you'll have to scroll down through all the calendars of mainAccount to see the calendars of dummyAccount. DummyAccount will have its own separate Events, Reminders, and Tasks calendars. The only accounts you want to be visible are both mainAccount Events and dummyAccount Events. I mean, I guess whatever - you can have Contacts, Birthdays, Tasks, Reminders - but UNCHECK all the additional calendars for mainAccount, otherwise you'll see your events twice, and that's annoying.

4. Create an event in mainAccount (you'll want to do this on your computer). Make sure it is NOT in your Events calendar, but in whatever separate calendar(s) you've created.

5. As you are creating an event in mainAccount, invite dummyAccount to attend. And spare yourself the email invites, sheesh.

6. In your Android phone, you should now see dummyAccount's events. Since you've been invited to them, they're outlined and not shaded in. When you open an event on your phone, you will see that it is marked "Going? Yes/no/maybe" at the bottom. If you squint, you can pretend that it's asking, "Did you go?" When you select "yes" then the event will be shaded in on your calendar.

7. ...Hence, I've named my dummyAccount Events calendar "I did this!" Now I'll have a single place where I can see all the stuff I accomplished this year.

Cons:

• It's slightly annoying that the prompt is "Going?" rather than "Did you go?" <-- but if they had that, I wouldn't have needed this workaround at all.
• There isn't a good way to maintain my color-coded events on my phone (but that's okay, and might even help me to focus more) since they are all in a single calendar (remember, the dummyAccount Events calendar that I named "I did this!"). On the other hand, they still are slightly colorcoded - empty for not done, shaded for done. 
• It is a little annoying to add an event from my phone. To add it to the right calendar, I would have to start by finding that calendar, checking it off as viewable, and then going through the steps to add the event. Fortunately, 90% of my events are created from my computer, so that's not a huge deal. Also, I often just use google keep when I'm in a rush anyway (like at the doctor's office) and then add the events later. But it's not ideal.
• It will take some time for me to get used to adding my dummyAccount to events, and it is slightly longer. But honestly, it's wayyyyy less of a pain than this workaround. Um, no, I am not going to edit the event's title every time I want to mark it as done. That is the kind of workaround that would cause me to switch calendars entirely.
• It will take a little bit of effort to both invite my dummyAccount to all future events, as well as transition all the evens in my mainAccount Events calendar to other auxiliary calendars. So that's annoying, but it's a one-time thing. Moving forward, I now know what to do.

Which would be a real pity because Google Calendar is great at so many other things, including creepily adding itineraries from gmail into my calendar. I say it's creepy - it's actually soooo helpful.

It just kinda sucks at understanding how I use this app to motivate myself and get stuff done.

As an aside: google goals are automatically added to the Events calendar of my mainAccount. That is why I choose to keep mainAccount Events calendar visible on my phone. Those actually do stay color-coded, too. So that's great.

As another aside: I learned through this experience that a GSuite account allows you to set up appointments through google calendar, while a regular google account does not. I also learned that if you are logged into your mainAccount in the browser, but even if you're in dummyAccount's google Calendar, it will still default to showing you all the mainAccount's Events calendar events (along with dummyAccount's calendar events - all of them, I think) on the appointment page. But fortunately, it won't show that stuff to anybody else who is not logged into your mainAccount google account, or if they're using another browser. Confused yet? Well, this matters because I don't really want to share a calendar with lots of people to set up Czech speaking appointments and have them see my reminders to meditate, fold 2 baskets of laundry, go to sleep, go to sleep for real, etc.