How to Change Event Notifications in Google Calendar

A meeting went by with no warning, or the ten minute ping arrives far too late to be useful. Google Calendar keeps two separate settings that both call themselves notifications: the reminder attached to one event, and the default that every new event on a calendar inherits. Changing one does nothing to the other, which is why a fixed event still produces the same bad timing next week.

Set the reminder on one event

Open the event and click the pencil icon to edit it. Find the Notifications section, choose Notification or Email in the first dropdown, then enter a number and choose minutes, hours, days, or weeks before. Click Save.

Add a second reminder

In the same Notifications section, click Add notification for another row, which can use a different method and a different lead time. A pop-up thirty minutes ahead plus an email the day before is a common pairing. Remove any row with the X at its right. Click Save.

Change the default for a whole calendar

Hover the calendar under My calendars, click the three-dot menu, then Settings and sharing. Under Event notifications, set the reminders that new events on that calendar should start with, and set All-day event notifications separately, since all-day items are timed from the start of the day rather than from an hour. These defaults apply to events created from now on and leave existing events alone.

Turn on desktop notifications

Click the gear icon, then Settings, then Notification settings. Set Notifications to Desktop notifications rather than Alerts or Off. The browser then asks for permission to show notifications, and that permission has to be allowed. If no prompt appears, check the site permissions for calendar.google.com in the browser, since a previous block is remembered. Google Calendar must be open in a tab for desktop notifications to fire.

The phone app is a third set of switches. The Google Calendar app for Android and iPhone keeps its own settings under the app's menu, Settings, then the calendar in question. Alerts also have to be allowed for the app in the phone's own notification settings, so a reminder that is correct on the web can still stay silent on the phone.