Change Google Calendar default event notifications

Posted November 11th, 2015 in Miscellaneous Postings

Google Calendar will create both an email and pop-up notification by default whenever you add an event, set to 10 minutes before, or at a specific time the day before for all day events. If you don't one of these set up each time you create an event, or want to change the  default notification timeframe, you can edit the defaults in the Google Calendar settings.

When you add an event, both an email and pop-up notification is created by default, as shown in the first screenshot below. You can remove one or other (or both) for this specific event and/or change the notification times.

If you find yourself always editing these notifications whenever you add an event, you can instead change the notification defaults to save yourself time when adding events in the future.

Find the cog icon button, which is top right in the Google Calendar web interface, and click it to expand the menu. Then select "Settings" as shown in the next screenshot:

Then click the "Calendars" tab on the next page:

Locate your calendar (mine is labelled "Chris Hope" as shown below) and click the "Edit Notifications" link to get into the notification settings.

You'll now see a screen like the one shown below. This was the settings at their defaults for my particular calendar before I started changing them as I wrote this post.

Make your changes by setting the times to different values, remove notifications, adding notifications, etc, and then click the "Save" button at the top of the page. This will then take you back to the previous page and any new events that are added to the calendar will use these new notification defaults.

Note that the screenshots on this page are accurate as of November 11th 2015 and of course will only be valid until Google makes its next user interface changes.