Gentle reminders for Google Calendar

If you use pop-up reminders in Google Calendar, you’ll have noticed how the reminder interrupts whatever you’re doing to take pride of place on your screen. Although this is great for ensuring you don’t miss an event, in can be frustrating when you are right in the middle of something important. The Gentle reminders Calendar lab takes a more polite approach, giving you a blinking browser bar or a notification in the right corner of your screen that does not steal the focus. You can have a nice sound alert too.

Here’s the difference:

Standard reminder

Gentle reminder

As you can see, the Gentle reminders notification is much less intrusive, but still does the job of letting you know about upcoming events.

To enable gentle reminders:
1. Click the Settings cog button > Settings.
2. Select the Labs tab.
3. Find and enable the Gentle reminders lab.
4. Click Save.

To configure gentle reminders:

1. Click the Settings cog button > Settings.
2. Select the General tab.
3. Find the Gentle reminders (labs) section.
4. Tick or un-tick the options to suit your preferences. Leave the Show floating desktop notifications option ticked to get a pop-up reminder (Google Chrome users only).

This lab is most effective when used in Google Chrome, as it supports floating notifications. However, if you are not a Google Chrome user, you will still see the blinking browser tab with the name of the event, and the full pop up notification when you open the tab.
Tip: Clicking on the floating notification will make it disappear, then take you to your calendar and prompt you to have another reminder in five minutes.