How to Sync Notion with Google Calendar

Do you use Google Calendar to set up events, schedule meetings, or organize project activities? And do you use Notion to take notes, create wikis, or manage tasks and projects?

Would you like to integrate the two services together to manage your projects and stay up-to-date with upcoming tasks or team meetings? If you do, here’s a guide to help you integrate Google Calendar with Notion so you can sync your updates from Google Calendar onto Notion.

But first, let’s address a few questions.

Why use Google Calendar with Notion?

Undeniably, Notion is one of the best productivity apps out there. But despite its extensive set of features that let you take notes, create wikis, set up databases, create a website, work with teams on kanban boards for collaboration and even integrate other services, Notion does not offer a full-fledged calendar service. One that can serve the requirements of most users and possesses the ability to replace conventional calendar apps such as Google Calendar. It does, however, ace at its primary job — of offering an all-in-one workspace that can be used to structure and organize projects — better than most other apps. [Check out our detailed guide on Notion to learn more.]

Similarly, Google Calendar, on the other hand, is one of the best and most preferred calendar apps of choice for most users for scheduling and managing tasks and meetings. But despite offering some project management functionalities, it falls short of the requisite features that modern project management services provide.

And this is exactly where the purpose of integration comes into play — to allow you to manage your projects and collaborate with teammates using the prowess of Notion and keep track of upcoming events, meetings, and tasks with the help of Google Calendar. That way, you can streamline your workflow since you can now view all your calendar tasks right within the project structure in Notion. And, in turn, save yourself some time that would otherwise be spent hopping between the two apps (Notion and Google Calendar).

How does Notion integrate with Google Calendar?

Google Calendar integration with Notion is a fairly straightforward process: you make your calendar on Google Calendar public, copy its public URL, and add that to your Notion page. But, before you get too excited and start integrating your calendars, there’s one thing you need to know.

Even after you integrate (or embed, rather) Google Calendar into your Notion workspace, you can’t make changes to your calendars in Notion. This is because, in the process of attempting to integrate the two services, what you are essentially doing is embedding Google Calendar on Notion, which is not really what integration means and how it works. As a result, the calendars you add to Notion offer view-only permission, holding you captive from modifying the entries in your Google Calendar within Notion.

Fortunately, though, you can modify events, schedules, and other calendar entries on Google Calendar — like you usually do — and have them appear in your Notion workspace. But, there’s still a catch: the syncing of entries takes some time to reflect in Notion. So you might have to wait for a few seconds (or minutes, in some cases) to see the changes you made to your calendar in Calendar.

Related Read: 10 Best Free Notion Templates for Windows, Mac

How to integrate Google Calendar with Notion?

As we mentioned in the previous section, what you think of as integration between Google Calendar and Notion is not actually integration. It is more like embedding your calendars from Google Calendar into your Notion workspace so that you are always on top of your scheduled tasks and upcoming meetings.

Steps to embed Google Calendar into Notion

1. Head over to Google Calendar and sign in with your account.
2. Hover over the calendar you want to embed under My calendars from the left section and click on the three-dot menu.
3. As soon as you click on the menu, you will see a few different options. Select Settings and sharing from here.
   
4. On the Calendar settings page, scroll down to the Access permissions section and check the checkbox next to Make available to public. And in the Warning popup, click OK.
5. Next, select Integrate Calendar from the left-hand menu under Settings for my calendars.
6. Scroll down to the Integrate calendar section and copy the URL under Public URL to this calendar.
   
7. Now, open Notion and sign in with your account.
8. Head over to your workspace (and the page) you want to embed Google Calendar into.
   
9. In the Notion editor, type in /embed. And, in the popup, select Embed link and paste the calendar link you just copied.
10. Finally, hit Embed link.

Once embedded, you can change a few visual settings about the calendar. One, you can drag the gray bars around the calendar to increase or decrease its size. And two, you can switch between the week and the month view to view the scheduled tasks. What’s more, you can click on the Agenda tab, next to the week and month view, to find all your upcoming calendar events listed in one place.

Should you sync Google Calendar with Notion after all?

Well, the answer to that question depends on what you are trying to achieve by integrating the two services. If you are looking to create a workspace in Notion where you can have all the updates and information related to your project in one place so that you and your team members are always up-to-date with your project’s proceedings, integrating Google Calendar with Notion makes absolute sense.

However, if you are integrating the two services, thinking you can plan your projects or personal workflow and add tasks automatically to your calendar within Notion, you can’t really benefit much from the integration. Instead, a better choice, in that case, would be to use some other project management solution that supports real integration with the read and write functionality.