Find assigned tasks from Google Drive

At Mozilla, we write a lot of documents. It enables us to work efficiently while having the team spread across the world. We do a lot of work through docs but also keep extensive notes about every meeting. And in these meeting notes, we assign tasks to members with the built-in mechanic.

With many tasks spread out across different documents, it's hard to keep track of them manually. Luckily, Google Drive has a search option for open assigned tasks and since I've now googled it three times because I always forgot, I'm sharing it on the blog for my and your benefit.

Assigning tasks

To assign things to people, you can leave a comment by highlighting any text, in this case a checkbox label and clicking the blue + icon that adds a comment. Inside the comment, you can tag the user with @[their email]. If you select the "Assign to [name]" box, it will be assigned to them, otherwise they just get a notification.

Finding your tasks

To find your open assigned tasks, you need to perform a Google Drive search with query followup:actionitems . To perform that search, you can copy-paste that into your Google Drive search field or click this link.

It will show all the documents and on top right corner of each document, show a badge with number of open tasks.

For me, learning about this was such a life saver as I don't have to worry about forgetting those tasks anymore. I can start each day or week by going through all open ones, close the ones I've already completed and adjust my todo list based on them.