If you’re like me and prefer to keep your phone as uncluttered as possible and mainly opt for stock solutions, you’re probably using Google Calendar as your main planner. It’s simple, convenient, and most importantly it’s synced with your Google Account, so you don’t have to worry about missing an appointment or a birthday.
Google Calendar is a great tool out of the box. However, there are a few easy tweaks you can do to make it even better. And among the first things you should have in mind when setting up Google Calendar to your liking are the notifications.
By default, Google Calendar doesn’t send you notifications about the upcoming events. Even though everything is still in the calendar, the lack of an appropriate notification can make it easy for you to simply overlook or forget an important event.
So, setting up notifications that will tell you about upcoming work or family-related event could be a lifesaver. And that’s what we’re going to do here.
How to set up Google Calendar notifications on Android
Google Calendar will notify you when a certain reminder is due, so you don’t have to worry about that. On the other hand, you won’t get a notification from any other event registred in your calendar.
There are two ways of enabling Event notifications in Google Calendar. You can set up a notification for every event, or for a specific event. Here’s how to set up notifications for all events in general:
- Open Google Calendar on your Android phone.
- Open the hamburger menu, and go to Settings.
- Tap Events (or Family, for events shared with your family members).
- Tap Add notification. You can choose between “regular” events and all-day events, the process is the same.
- Choose when you want to receive the notification. Selecting the Custom option gives you even more possibilities, as you can select the precise time, as well as if you want to receive the notification as a regular system notification or as email.
As you can tell, these are general settings, and they apply to every event stored in your calendar. If you want to set up a notification for a specific event, follow these instructions:
- Open Google Calendar on your Android phone.
- Find and tap a specific event.
- Tap Edit (the pencil icon).
- Go to Add notification.
- Choose the time you want to receive the notification at, and whether you want it as a regular phone notification or as an email.
Unfortunately, there are some Calendar entries, like birthdays and public holidays, that don’t support notifications. So, you’ll be on your own with these. If you don’t want to miss your loved one’s birthday (and that happnes), you’ll probably want to write it down somewhere you can always see it all the time.
That’s about it. As you can see, it takes less than a minute to set up event notifications in Google Calendar, but it can be a lifesaver in some situations. If you have any comments, questions or suggestions just let us know in the comments below.
