How to integrate TickTick with Fantastical using Zapier

Photo by J Lee on Unsplash

At the moment of writing this article (Oct 8, 2022) there are no direct integrations between TickTick and Fantastical. Though, it doesn’t mean we can’t integrate them at all.

Prerequisites

1. Free Zapier account
2. Google email account
3. Your TickTick account

The Idea or TL;DR

Fantastical can use the Google Tasks service, which is bound to the google email account by default, as a source of data that can be used to fetch tasks and display them on a calendar. This means we don’t have to directly connect TickTick to the Fantastical. We only need to connect TickTick to Google Tasks, which is quite an easy task as both services are in Zapier.

Integration

1. Log in to your Zapier account
2. Open this flow (it’s called Zap). What it does is Whenever a new Task is created in TickTick, send it to Google Tasks
3. Connect your TickTick and Google Mail accounts
4. Test the Zap that you opened

In the left image, we tested the first action: we fetched the example task from our TickTick account. In the right image, we are testing the second action: taking the task and sending it to the Google Tasks service

How can we tell if it worked out? Well, easily. Let’s open Google Tasks:

The test of the second action actually sent data to Google Tasks, that’s why we can see it in the tasks section

Once we’ve finished with testing, we need to press Publish Zap button. This turns on the Zap, and since that moment Zapier starts checking for updates every 15 minutes. So if you create 5 different tasks, they won’t appear in the tasks section instantly. It will take up to 15 minutes to go through the flow for all 5 tasks, not for each.

As you probably know, Fantastical checks for updates every 5 minutes. It means that the tasks from Google Tasks won’t appear in the calendar instantly. It can take up to 5 minutes to pass the data, but it will pass all tasks, not one task every 5 minutes.

And here’s the result of our integration:

Conclusion

You definitely would need to spend some time to figure out what else you can do in the suggested flow. Zapier and its integrations can be more flexible than I described here. So you might want to change something for your needs.

In case you have a paid Zapier account, you can create multi steps zaps that can be more flexible: for example, you can include if conditions in your flow to either run the zap or skip. The initial idea was to skip the zap in case I haven’t set the end date for the task. It makes sense because if you don’t have an end date, the task won’t be displayed on your calendar. For this particular reason, I use 2 zaps: one for newly created tasks and one for updated ones (in case there’s a task already in the TickTick, but I haven’t set the end date for it). I will post a link to the second zap at the end of this article.

Caveats + one more Zap

• If you don’t set an end date for your task in TickTick, the task will not appear in your calendar at the end of the flow.
• The process is not instant. Zapier checks for updates every 15 minutes and Fantastical refreshes data every 5 minutes.
• In case you don’t see tasks on your calendar even though you completed all steps successfully, you need to turn on tasks on your calendar. Preferences → Calendars → Google (Tasks) → My Tasks → press check
• The suggested Zap only handles the flow when we create a task in TickTick. Though there’s another flow that we need to handle and it is updating existing tasks. Here’s the link to the extra Zap that you need to test and publish after configuration, just as we did.

Thanks for reading this and I hope it will help. In case you have problems with the configuration, you can post details of your problem in the comments. Me or other people would be happy to help.