Why must my Google calendar look like a KandyKid puked Skittles on it?

April 2, 2011 10:31 AM

Please help me tidy up our color-coded shared Google calendars.

My husband, son and I share our Google calendars. When one of us has an important event, activity or deadline, we add it and send the others an invite, causing it to appear on my calendar thrice, in pink, in blue and again in green. The "invite" is so that each of us will get the automatic sms notifications of things we need reminding of closer to the time it's happening.

Is there a way to set the shared calendars to recognize identical events? Or is there a setting that will send sms notifications to all of us without adding the event to our individual calendars?

posted by simbiotic to technology (2 answers total)

You should be able to add reminders for yourself on shared calendars. Just go to the event details - I have an add reminder option on mine. I assume that's meant to be a reminder for you and not the owner of the calendar, but I've never tried it.
posted by natabat at 11:19 AM on April 2, 2011

You can definitely add a reminder (to yourself) on a shared calendar, even if it is not your calendar. The unsolved problem is how to tell your SO or other family members that you added a new event. right now my wife and I will just text or gchat to say "hey i made dinner plans for friday night - did you see that?" But we prefer this over the multiple copies of the same event appearing.

(we have a "fred", "jane", "shared" calendars, and we add to the appropriate calendar depending on who is attending the event)
posted by misterbrandt at 12:47 PM on April 2, 2011