The Task Assignment Automation
Google Docs is heavily optimized for team collaboration and project management. One of its most aggressive collaboration features is automatic Action Items. By default, if you are typing a meeting agenda or a project outline and you type a phrase like “John to finish the report” or “Send invoice to Sarah,” Google Docs uses natural language processing to detect the intent. It will automatically highlight the phrase and pop up a suggestion box offering to officially assign that task to a specific Google account user as an “Action Item,” complete with an email notification.
While this is a fantastic feature for corporate project managers actively using Docs to track deliverables, it can be incredibly irritating if you are just writing a standard document, a novel, or a script where characters are giving each other instructions. If your document frequently triggers false positives, prompting you to assign tasks to your coworkers every time you type the word “to” next to a name, it disrupts your writing flow. If you prefer to manage tasks in a dedicated project management tool rather than having Google parse your sentences, you must disable this automation.
How to Stop Automatic Action Items
You can prevent Google Docs from analyzing your text for task assignments via the Preferences menu.
- Open a document in Google Docs.
- Look at the top toolbar and click on the Tools menu.
- Select Preferences from the dropdown list.
- In the Preferences window, ensure you are on the General tab.
- Locate the checkbox labelled Automatically suggest action items.
- Click the checkbox to remove the checkmark.
- Click the blue OK button to save your changes.
From now on, you can type instructional sentences or names without Google Docs interrupting you to assign tasks. (Note: You can still manually assign an action item anytime by highlighting text, inserting a comment, and typing @ followed by the person’s email address).