Google Calendar makes it easy to keep track of upcoming events, from work meetings to birthdays and anniversaries. However, you can make the app work even better by integrating Google Tasks with your calendar. This allows you to create to-do lists and check items off as you accomplish them, for optimal organisation. Here are the steps!

Google Tasks has been around for nearly 10 years. While digital to-do lists are great for keeping yourself organised, Google's attempt always felt like a half-effort. With no official mobile app, you had to turn to a third-party app to access your tasks from your smartphone or tablet, or you had to pull up the mobile version of Gmail on your favourite browser - as if.

Google's task management toolkit has been sitting somewhere between crappy and cluster**** for some time. The company has obstinately refused to make it easy for users to add and manage tasks through an app or a single point of interaction. But that's changing today with the release of Google Tasks - a new app that cleans up Google's previous dog's breakfast of task management tools.

Android: If you're a fan of Google Tasks and you'd like to put quick access to your task lists right on your Android home screen, gTasx is a simple wrapper for Google Tasks.

If you're an Android owner and a fan of Google's very simple Tasks app, you can access it from a dedicated Android page at mail.google.com/tasks/android. Bookmark that link and add it to your home screen, and you've got a free and very functional web-based task manager. Thanks to Miguel for the URL find!

Windows/Mac/Linux (Adobe AIR): We've written about a lot of desktop clients that are essentially site-specific browsers (SSBs), but free AIR client Google Tasks helps you consolidate your clients by allowing access to most Google apps in mobile form.

We pointed to an iGoogle interface for Google's Tasks to-do manager yesterday that gave users a pretty big view inside their custom home page. Want a totally full-size Tasks view without launching iGoogle? Bookmark the "Canvas view" page.

Android: If you're an Android user who's keen on Google's Tasks to-do manager, a beta application can give you offline access and syncing to the tasks you've stashed away in Gmail, Google Calendar or iGoogle.

Google Tasks graduated from Gmail Labs back in July, but it's still adding the occasional feature to tighten its integration with Gmail. Today, for example, Tasks added a small but useful feature allowing you to quickly and easily email a task list.

Google Tasks' recent emergence from Google Labs has attracted plenty of discussion and criticism, but not much of that mentions that it originated in the company's Sydney labs. Lifehacker chatted with local Google software engineer Michael Lancaster about how it came about, why it appears to lack a few key features, what's ahead for Tasks, and how he uses it to maximise his own productivity.

A late arrival to the crowded space of web-based to-do lists, Gmail Tasks has graduated from experimental status and is now available to all users by default. Should you start moving your to-do's into Gmail Tasks? Short answer: Not yet.