Well, look at you using your shiny organized Google calendar to manage everything. You’ve got meetings, doctor’s appointments, projects to work on, and everything’s working great for you. You’ve set up all your appointments so well that you even set reminders to notify you a few minutes before each appointment on your calendar! Go you!
I don’t know about you but I love those reminders so much. I love how I can set each appointment on my Google calendar to remind me hours and even minutes before each appointment so I can remember that something’s coming up. If I have a meeting coming up, I set my reminder so that I can gather my meeting materials and get prepared.
If you use Google calendar, surely you’ve noticed that every time you create an appointment, you get those reminders that pop up on your phone, computer, or both. You set them up every time you schedule an appointment time slot on your calendar.
But there’s only one thing…What if you don’t want to manually adjust that reminder every single time you create an appointment?
What if you want all of your appointments to notify you twice: 30 minutes and 5 minutes beforehand with a pop-up?
Here’s the good news! There’s a way to set your reminder preferences so they automatically populate for you. Let’s take a look at how you can do this, even if you’re a new Google calendar user.
First you’ll create an appointment on your Google calendar. After you fill in your appointment information, you’ll click more options. Here you have the opportunity to change how you get notified. The problem is that Google gives you some default settings that are really easy to change. I personally like to receive my reminders thirty minutes and five minutes before each appointment, but you can change that to be whatever you want. Some people even set their reminders to be the day before and the hour before.
Google gives you default reminder settings that may not suit you, and manually changing the settings on each appointment is a waste of time.
There’s a special but easy setting to edit so that you can control the default settings and never have to manually adjust the reminders on each appointment again!
Here’s how you’ll do it!
First, you’ll want to click on settings and sharing on the left hand side next to your calendar. Then, you’ll want to scroll to event notifications. Here you’ll be able to modify your reminder settings.
Next, you’ll remove the existing email notification and add a preferred notification time. It can be the day before, an hour before, or even 5 minutes before, it’s totally your prerogative. There. Now you’ve stopped to sing the Bobby Brown song. Congrats! You’ve officially got that song stuck in your head all day!
Now, let’s get back to it.
All of the appointments on my calendar in the how-to video above previously had default reminders set for a pop up 30 minutes before and an email 10 minutes before. If I manually changed this setting on each appointment, it would override the default appointment reminder settings, but only for one appointment at a time!
Why do that when you can save a few seconds every time you set an appointment with this tip so the default settings can do the work for you?
Trust me. Those seconds add up so saving them is a beautiful thing!
Here’s the last step. Once you set your specific reminder preferences, just click the back button. Your new reminder preferences will automatically be the default.
It’s a super simple. Easy fix, right? Who knew that it was going to be such an easy solution to save time with every appointment you enter?!
Bonus: if you’re an Android user, using the Google Calendar app, those defaults will translate to appointments created on your mobile phone!
Did this tip help you? Tell me in the comments below!
