Googleカレンダーの通知: the setup order that holds up

There are four places to change Google Calendar notifications, and they sit at different levels: the account wide settings, the per calendar defaults, the per event overrides, and the permission granted to the browser and to macOS. Opening them in the wrong order is what produces the familiar result of changing something, seeing no difference, and no longer remembering what was changed. Worked through from the bottom up, the whole job takes about fifteen minutes for one account.

Decide one thing before touching anything

The decision worth making first is which calendars are supposed to change behavior.

Most accounts hold several kinds of calendar at once: meetings the person actually attends, calendars subscribed to in order to see what colleagues are doing, a company wide events calendar, a personal calendar holding nothing but deadlines, and automatic feeds such as birthdays or public holidays. Only the first and fourth categories ever require action.

Making this call up front determines every value in the steps below. Calendars that require action get one or two short reminders. Calendars that exist to be looked at get none. Deadline calendars get something the evening before. Skipping this decision and applying one value everywhere is what makes notification volume track event count instead of importance, and the end state of that is ignoring all of them.

Step 1: Set the per calendar defaults

Start here, because this is what every newly created event inherits. Get it right once and future events are correct without further work.

On a computer, open Google Calendar, click the settings icon at the top right, and open Settings. In the left hand list of calendars the account owns, pick one and open its settings. Two separate blocks appear, one named event notifications and one named all day event notifications.

In each block:

• Choose notification or email, and how far in advance it fires
• Use add notification to add a second one
• Use the remove control to delete one that is not needed

Use the fact that the two blocks are independent. All day events have no start time, so a zero minute reminder fires at the beginning of the day, which is too late to act on a deadline or a renewal. Setting only the all day block to the previous evening leaves time to do something.

These blocks appear only on calendars the account owns. A calendar shared by a colleague has no default block, so reminders there have to be attached event by event.

Repeat this for each calendar. It looks tedious, but it is the step that stops the same judgment call from repeating every time an event is created, which is exactly when it gets skipped.

Step 2: Set the account wide behavior

To change the settings, you need to open Calendar in a web browser, like Chrome or Safari. If you're asked to let "calendar.google.com" show notifications, you need to allow it. Source: support.google.com

Open Settings, then notification settings under general on the left. Three things are decided here.

The first is the delivery style. The notifications dropdown chooses between desktop notifications, which appear outside the browser, alerts, which appear inside the Calendar window, and off.

The second is snooze. With desktop notifications turned on, show snoozed notifications sets the delay. Two conditions apply: snooze works only in Chrome, and when an event carries several reminder times, the snooze control appears only on the last one. Planning to use snooze is a reason to keep reminders per event low.

The third is response filtering. A checkbox limits notifications to events answered yes or maybe. In an organization where broad invitations are normal, this single setting changes the daily count more than anything else on the page.

Step 3: Clear the permission chain

Correct settings produce nothing if permission is missing. Work down the stack.

In Chrome, open the more menu at the top right, then Settings, then privacy and security, then site settings, then notifications. Next to the list of sites allowed to send notifications, click add, enter calendar.google.com, and confirm. Safari, Firefox, and Edge each have an equivalent screen, and the exact steps belong to each browser's own documentation.

Below the browser is macOS, which decides per application whether notifications are permitted, whether they appear as a banner that clears itself or an alert that stays on screen, whether they collect in Notification Center, and whether a sound plays. A Focus adds a further gate, and an application that is not permitted to interrupt that Focus stays silent regardless of everything above.

One more condition gets missed regularly: browser notifications require Google Calendar to still be open in the browser. Closing the tab stops them. All of this is stored per browser and per machine, so a second Mac needs the same pass.

Step 4: Override individual events

With defaults in place, individual events should only be touched when they are exceptions. Open the event, click edit, and adjust the notifications section. Add notification adds another, the remove control deletes one, and save at the top commits it.

The ceiling is five override reminders per event, each set between 0 and 40,320 minutes before the start. That upper bound is four weeks. Each can be a popup or an email, so a combination such as an email the day before and a popup shortly ahead fits inside the same five slots.

How far ahead to set them depends on what happens before the event, not during it. An appointment requiring travel needs travel time plus preparation time. A video call that needs a document opened needs very little. Filling all five slots trains the reader to ignore the first one, so two is usually the practical maximum.

Step 5: Repeating events and second accounts

Changing a reminder on a repeating event asks for a scope: this event, this and following events, or all events. Choosing wrongly is why a fix reverts the following week.

The rule is straightforward. A one off reason, such as travel being involved only this week, means this event. A change in the underlying arrangement, such as a new start time or a move from video to in person, means this and following events. All events is rarely correct, because rewriting past occurrences serves no purpose.

Accounts multiply the work. Notification settings are stored per account, so a work account and a personal account each need steps 1, 2, and 4 separately, even when both are displayed in one window. Browser and macOS permission only needs doing once per machine. Fixing one account and concluding that nothing improved is the usual consequence of missing this.

Step 6: Phone, and the other notifications

Phone settings are not separate from computer settings. The documentation gives the example directly: a reminder created on a handset turns up as a popup on the computer at the same offset. Whichever device is used to configure it, both ends follow, and a deletion propagates the same way.

Silencing only the handset is done in the device's own settings rather than in Calendar. On Android, that is settings, then notifications, then app notifications, then Calendar. Computer and email notifications continue. On iPhone and iPad, notifications for a calendar are removed inside the Google Calendar app by swiping left on a notification and tapping delete.

Separately from event reminders sits a group called other notifications, reached from a calendar's settings. Categories such as changed events and event responses can each be set to email or to none. This is the lever for inbox volume specifically, and it does not affect what pops up before a meeting. Where invitation email is heavy, Google also documents building Gmail filters to label or archive routine calendar traffic automatically.

Reminders on calendars owned by someone else

Step 1 has a gap, and it catches people who work from a team calendar. Because default blocks only exist on owned calendars, a shared team calendar or a subscribed feed offers nowhere to set a rule. Every reminder has to go on individual events, and on a subscribed feed there is often no editing permission to do even that.

Three approaches exist, and the right one depends on how many events are involved. For a handful of events per month, adding a reminder directly on each event is fine, provided the sharing permission allows changes. For a steady stream, duplicating the events that matter onto an owned calendar restores the defaults, at the cost of maintaining the copies. For a feed that cannot be edited at all, such as a subscribed public schedule, the only option that scales is creating an owned event alongside it.

There is a fourth approach that gets reached for and does not work: asking the calendar owner to add reminders. Notification settings are personal, so reminders added by the owner appear only for the owner. Nothing done on someone else's account will cause a notification on this one.

Deciding which of these applies is a five minute exercise, and it belongs at the end of step 1 rather than being discovered three weeks later when an event is missed.

Three patterns that cover most accounts

For anyone unsure what values to enter, one of these three usually fits.

Situation	Calendar default	Per event exception
Meeting heavy	One popup 10 minutes ahead, response filter on	Earlier reminder when travel is involved
Deadline driven	All day block set to the previous evening	Email one week ahead for large deadlines
Watching others	No reminders at all	None, plus other notifications set to none

Mixing two of these on one account is normal, since a person can be deadline driven on a personal calendar and meeting heavy on a work one. What does not work is applying the same row to every calendar in the list, which is the state most accounts start from.

The meeting heavy pattern relies on the response filter doing the volume reduction. The deadline pattern deliberately leaves the timed event block empty, because deadlines belong in the all day track. The watching pattern requires no work, since subscribed calendars have no default block to begin with.

What to change first

Run the current setup for one week and count two numbers: reminders received, and reminders that changed what happened next. A wide gap means the per calendar defaults from step 1 are still wrong, and the fix is emptying the blocks on calendars that never require action. If the counts are close but events are still being missed, reminders are not the mechanism at fault, and the next question is whether every calendar can be seen in one place. Guide covers that sequence in full, Entering events covers how events should be recorded so the defaults do the right thing, and Caltimate sets out how the desktop options differ.