Quick Google Calendar Tip: Setting Default Notifications

Google Calendar notifications rock! Not only do I get alerts by email and browser popups, I also get event alerts on my mobile phone via SMS. Now for most appointments or meetings I need to be reminded of I set the SMS notification at least an hour before, to be sure I don’t forget, and to be sure I have ample time to travel to my meeting destination (if it’s not online).

Thing is, we’ve been giving tips here on how to create events using shortcuts. For instance, you can drag and drop on an area in day view in your calendar your event will be created with the defined times (or days if multi-day view). Or you can jot down an event in one line (including time and date) and it will automatically be created for you.

However, in these cases the alerts will follow the usual defaults for that particular calendar. So if you’re too lazy to set up notifications each time you can set up the default notification per calendar.

First you click the options button to the right of the calendar you want to set defaults for. Then click notifications.

By default notifications should be blank. This is especially true if you’re modifying a public calendar or a calendar that was shared to you. You can add a default notification by clicking the Add reminder link.

You can choose among Email, Popup or SMS for your notification. And then you can select how long before the actual start of the event you wish to be notified. With SMS alerts, we assume you’ve set up your account for this functionality. See here how to setup SMS with Google Calendar.

You can add another form of notification if you wish, by clicking Add another reminder. You can actually have multiple instances of one reminder type. For example, you want to be reminded via SMS one full day before the event, and then another reminder one hour before the actual event. This is possible.

Should you wish to override this default on a per-entry basis, that is also possible. Just be sure to edit the Reminder portion under event options. In this field, it’s also possible to have multiple instance of the same reminder type. So you can actually setup Google Calendar to remind you several times via email, popup or SMS, just to make sure you don’t miss an appointment.