All-day-event alarms at 11:50 PM are evil.

June 25, 2013 5:11 AM

On my iPod Touch, I use the Calendar app, which is synced to my Google Calendar (which is Google Apps for Education, if that matters.) I like having a reminder/alert for most events that occurs 10 minutes before the event. (It has saved my bacon a couple of times when I forgot an appointment, and I find it useful for keeping me on track during the day.) However, I do not want to hear an alert at 11:50 PM before All-Day events.

If I remember to disable the Reminder on each all-day event in Google Calendar, then great—but all-day events are a quick way to drop information onto my calendar, so I often add them when busy and/or distracted, and I don't usually remember to disable the reminder. Then I get an alert for the event on my iPod at 11:50 PM, which wakes me up and makes me cranky.

Google's documentation claims that reminders for all-day events will arrive at 5 PM the previous day, but this is not what many people are experiencing. I'm pretty sure pop-up reminders on my computer are not arriving at 5 PM, either! (My time zone is set correctly on both Google Calendar and my iPod; I haven't had any problems with the timing of other alerts, even when traveling and changing time zones.)

Google Calendar has no way to set the defaults for all-day events differently from regular events.

In the iOS Calendar app, you can set the default alert for all-day events and regular events separately, but this only applies to events created within the Calendar app, while events that come over from Google either come over with the 11:50-PM alert. I'm not sure if it's Google or Calendar that's doing it. The fact that the alert is 10 minutes before the event seems to implicate Google, because that's how I have Reminders set up there, and all my Default Alert Times in Calendar are set to None.

Finally, on my iPod, I set Notifications to Do Not Disturb from 11:45 PM to midnight. This worked for a while, but (I think) with an iOS update this spring, it stopped working, possibly because I use Sleep Cycle, so the iPod is not locked at night.

Please tell me there's a solution other than manually changing the Reminder on each all-day event!

posted by BrashTech to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: I have the same problem. I don't have a technological solution for you, but what I do now is just to append '8 am' to anything when I add it to my calendar and don't want to include a specified date. Since Google Calendar is pretty good at parsing text, it works well, and I don't get woken up until I would have been anyway. I'm really interested to see what other solutions people have.
posted by permiechickie at 5:56 AM on June 25, 2013 [2 favorites]

This may not be helpful, but I used to have the same problem, but it fixed itself and now my all day alerts go at 4:50 the day before. I did absolutely nothing to fix it so I had assumed it was an upgrade that Google did. Maybe they didn't fix it in the educational version yet?
posted by interplanetjanet at 7:22 AM on June 25, 2013

I have the same problem, but my calendar is synced to Outlook. In there, you can View > Change View > List. Add the column which shows the reminder, then sort by that column. I can quickly go down the date/time column and see which ones start at 12am. Click on the reminder bell and it disappears. Then Change View again and go back to Calendar.

I know this won't help you, but it might help someone else reading
posted by CathyG at 2:11 PM on June 25, 2013

Response by poster: Thanks for your ideas. I hope interplanetjanet is right and this fixes itself, and that Outlook users find CathyG's suggestion helpful.
posted by BrashTech at 7:35 AM on June 27, 2013

Response by poster: UPDATE: Under 10.7, for the iPhone, you can set Do Not Disturb to work "Always" or "Only while iPhone is locked." (I didn't update my Touch because i bought an iPhone, but hopefully it works for Touch, too.)
posted by BrashTech at 12:09 PM on September 20, 2013