How to Display Jira Tasks in Google Calendar?

Key takeaways

• Jira can't send its issues to Google Calendar on its own; with ActivityTimeline you subscribe to a personal iCal link and your scheduled Jira issues appear in Google Calendar.
• Google refreshes subscribed calendars itself, roughly every 8 hours, and nobody can make it faster.
• The other direction is a separate feature: ActivityTimeline Cloud imports your Google Calendar meetings, so they count against your capacity and, by default, as time spent.
• Import works in ActivityTimeline Cloud; export to Google Calendar works in Cloud and Data Center.
• Setup takes a few minutes per person, and you can try ActivityTimeline free for 30 days.

If your meetings live in Google Calendar and your work lives in Jira, every plan you make is half a plan. You see the issues, but not the three hours of calls that eat Tuesday, and the sprint quietly slips by a day.

Here's the short answer: Jira doesn't connect to Google Calendar by itself, but ActivityTimeline does, as two separate one-way flows. Export puts your scheduled Jira issues into Google Calendar through an iCal subscription. Import pulls your Google meetings into ActivityTimeline, where they reduce the hours you have for Jira work. Use either one or both. If you use Outlook, see how to show Jira tasks in Outlook.

Can you sync Jira with Google Calendar without an app?

Not directly. Jira Cloud has a calendar view for a project's work items, sprints and releases, but it lives inside Jira and doesn't offer a feed you can add to Google Calendar. To see Jira dates in Google Calendar, you need an app that publishes an iCal link.

What syncs, and in which direction?

The two flows are independent. Editing an event in one place doesn't change it in the other: change a meeting in Google, change an issue in Jira. What you gain is one picture of your week, where imported meetings take hours out of your capacity and the plan stops assuming you have eight free hours on a day full of calls.

How to show Jira tasks in Google Calendar

1. In ActivityTimeline, go to My Account → Calendar Integration and click Renew Calendar Link. Copy the iCal URL.
2. In Google Calendar on the web, click + next to Other calendars and choose From URL.
3. Paste the link and click Add calendar.
4. The calendar appears under Other calendars. Turn it on or off whenever you need it, and pick a color that tells it apart from your meetings.

You do this once. Google picks up changes on its own, roughly every 8 hours, so an issue you move in the morning may show up in Google Calendar in the afternoon. Google sets that interval for every subscribed calendar, and there's no way to speed it up.

How to show Google Calendar meetings in Jira

This direction is available in ActivityTimeline Cloud.

1. Go to My Account → Calendar Integration and click Import from Google Calendar. Approve the connection between Google and ActivityTimeline when asked.
2. Pick the Google calendars you want on your timeline and click Update.
3. Check the result. On the Planner, all imported events for a person sit in one Calendar Events line; click it to see the list for that day or week. In your Workspace you see every event separately.
4. Decide how meetings count. By default, imported events count towards your workload and, once they've happened, as time spent, so they show up in timesheets without anyone logging them. If your team would rather log meetings by hand, an admin can set Configuration → Timesheet Settings → External Calendar Worklog Behavior to Treat none as Worklogs. Then you click a meeting, choose Log to Jira and pick the issue.

If you won't attend a meeting, decline it in Google Calendar. Events can't be edited inside ActivityTimeline, and tentative ones still show.

What are the limits?

• Refresh time. Google refreshes the exported calendar roughly every 8 hours, and you can't change that.
• First import. The first sync brings in up to 500 events and loads the rest afterwards, so a busy calendar can take a while to line up.
• Sync schedule. After that, import syncs every few hours. There's a sync icon on the Calendar Integration page if you need it now.
• Which calendars. Only the calendars you selected are imported, so a shared team calendar shows up only if you picked it.
• Hosting. Import is part of ActivityTimeline Cloud. On Data Center you can still export your Jira schedule to Google Calendar.

None of this needs daily attention. Set it up once, and the week you see in Google Calendar and the week you plan in Jira finally match.

FAQ

Can I sync Jira with Google Calendar without an app?

Not directly. Jira Cloud has a calendar view inside Jira, but it doesn't offer a feed you can add to Google Calendar. Apps such as ActivityTimeline publish a personal iCal link, which you add once under Other calendars → From URL, and your scheduled Jira issues appear there.

How often do Jira tasks update in Google Calendar?

Google refreshes subscribed calendars roughly every 8 hours and doesn't let anyone change that. A change made in Jira in the morning may show up in Google Calendar in the afternoon. You don't need a new link after changes; the same subscription keeps updating.

Does importing Google Calendar work on Jira Data Center?

Importing Google events is available in ActivityTimeline Cloud. On Data Center you can still export your Jira schedule to Google Calendar with the iCal link, so your issues show next to your meetings, but meetings won't reduce your capacity in ActivityTimeline.

Will my Google meetings count as logged time in Jira?

By default, yes: once a meeting has passed, it counts as time spent and appears in timesheets. Admins can switch to manual logging, where people choose a Jira issue for each meeting and log it themselves, which suits teams that bill meetings to specific projects.

Want your Jira work and your Google meetings in one week view? ActivityTimeline has a 30-day trial, and your existing Jira data is already there. Start the trial