15 Mac Calendar Alert Tips

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some tips for getting the most out of the Alerts in the Calendar App on your Mac. 

When you create an event in the Calendar App you may get an Alert, say, 15 minutes before the event. But you can customize those events so they appear at different times or at the exact time of the event. You can even have multiple alerts for a single event. 

So when you create a new event in the Calendar you have the opportunity to set an alert. There's probably one set by default for each event. This will give you a notification on your Mac and across your Apple devices if you're using iCloud so you know when the event is happening or about to happen. But there are a lot of different ways to modify these alerts to fit your needs. 

I'm going to double click here in the monthly view on the calendar to just quickly create an event. I get this little window here where I can setup the event. I can give it a name and then set the date and time. It's already going to have the date from wherever it was I clicked but I can modify the time, say, let's have this be 11 a.m. for instance. Now when you go into this area here by clicking to modify the time you'll also see the ability to modify the alert. Now what you're going to see here is a default. For instance it may say 15 minutes before the event. But you don't have to settle for the default. If you want to get the alert at the exact time of the event, you don't need any advance warning of this, you can just change it to At Time of Event. So if the entire purpose of the event is to remind you of something at 11 a.m. on this day you don't have to set it for 11:15 a.m. just to get the alert to be at the proper time. 

Now if this is an event you have to travel to you may want it to alert you a certain number of minutes before hand so you can get there on time. So another option is instead of at the time of the event you can go up here to Travel Time and set that for some amount. So say if it is going to take 15 minutes or maybe we'll go to custom and say it is going to take 20 minutes to get there, if I set that up then this changes to At Start of Travel Time. So if you had it set to 15 minutes before you would go up to At Start of Travel Time and now it is going to alert you 20 minutes before. If you think you need to adjust that later just adjust the travel time and the alert will happen at the appropriate time. 

Now another way to do that is to actually enter a location for the event. So I'm going to type a sample location near me, just type a little bit of the address and pick out the place from the list and then when you set the time here you can set the alert for Time To Leave. What this will do is it will look at the location, figure out things like traffic, and giving you an alert telling you this event is say 22 minutes away and it might be time to leave. This is very useful if you're setting a calendar event on your Mac and then when it actually happens you're not even where your Mac is, you're somewhere else with your iPhone. You get the alert for the appropriate amount of time it takes to get there. 

Now when you create a new event it may automatically give you an alert 15 minutes ahead of time or at the time of the event, or maybe no alert at all and you always have to manually set the alert. You can change the Default. If you go to Calendar Settings and then go to Alerts here at the top. Now it is very important that you select the account here. I just have Calendars that are on my Mac, local only and iCloud. But you may also have other calendars like ones in Goggle. So choose the account first. Then choose the default alert time, so 15 minutes before, at the time of the event, None, and so on. For all day events, events that just have a date and no time. You can also set a default here. You can set whether or not these are only for this computer and you would use other defaults, say, on your iPhone. You also can turn this option On which will give you time to leave alerts even if you haven't set them up for that event. 

Now you may have notice when I have created an event and set a location for it I got two different alerts. You can create as many alerts as you want just by using the Plus button here. So I've got this 15 minutes before one. Let's set that to 10 minutes before. But I also want it to remind me about this event the day before. So I'll click Plus here and I'll create an alert for One Day before and you can continue to click Plus and create more alerts if you need them. You can also set these for any amount of time. You don't have to go with these default intervals. Just go to Custom here, and then set a number of minutes, like say 20 minutes. But you can also do hours or days before. 

If you find these videos valuable consider joining the more than 2000 others that support MacMost through Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com/patreon. 

You can also set them for a specific time. So choose from this list On Date. Then you can set a date. So I'll have it be a couple days before and then I'll have it be at a specific time on that day. So this is no longer related to the time of the event. The event can move to three days later and I'll still get this alert at this time.

Also notice another option under Custom is for After the Event Starts. So minutes, hours, or days after. So you can have an alert that's a reminder, say, to followup from things from that meeting or perhaps maybe if it is something where it's an online meeting and you don't need to be there at the very beginning of it, you can have the event be the real time for the meeting but only alert you 15 minutes after it starts. 

Now another kind of Custom Alert and one that I use all the time is to have an email message sent. Now you can only choose one of your email addresses. This is for sending an alert to YOU, not to somebody else. They would have to set that up on their calendar. Or if you just want to setup your Mac to send an email at a future time that's something you do in the Mail App. But here you can have your Calendar App send an alert to you as an email message at a certain amount of time before, after, or on a specific date. Then you get that in your email Inbox. For me that is really useful as somebody that always pays very close attention to the Inbox to be able to, say, have an alert for an important event a couple of hours before the event in with my other important emails that is still in my Inbox. 

Another thing you can do, under Custom, is set it to open a file. The default here is Calendar. So you can just have it open up the Calendar App instead of sending you an alert, or have it as a second alert in addition to a Notification, or you can have it set to open up a specific file. For instance maybe a spreadsheet file if the event involves adding data to a spreadsheet. Just select Other and then just choose any file you like. Now you can use that to have it play a custom sound for you. So, go into the Shortcuts App and create a shortcut, a really simple one. The first action is just File. Then you can choose the file for some sort of sound file you have on your Mac. Then the second action is just Play Sound to play the sound from that file. So now you want to go to File and then Add To Dock. When you do it adds it to the Dock but then you can just remove it from the Dock. You can now run this using the Calendar. Just select Open File, choose Other, and then go your Home folder Applications. Select it there and now it will open that little app that just plays that sound. But you can also use the Speak Text Action here to just put some text and have a Siri-like voice read the text to you. 

Now an alternative to creating an event in the Calendar is to simply create a Reminder. So just go to the Reminder's App in any list you like, like the main one here. Just create a new Reminder and then click on Add Date. Set a specific date. You can choose a Custom Date if you want. Then once you have a date set you can set a specific time. Just type the time in there and then this will give you a Notification. You can modify it here later on if you want. Even have it notify you early just like the Calendar does. 

It's always a bit of a dilemma trying to figure out if something belongs as a reminder in the Reminders App or as an event in the Calendar App. In general if something involves more than one person or going to a location then that's probably an event in the Calendar App. If something just involves you wanting to get a notification to do something or remember something at a specific time then that probably belongs as a reminder in the Reminder's App. But there is a lot of gray area in-between. Sometimes there's no right answer. You can do either one, whichever you like. 

Now a really cool option we've got, starting with macOS Tahoe, is that you can go into the Calendar App and see those reminders here in the Calendar App. So here's that one I just created. You need to have the Schedule Reminders Item, here on the left sidebar under Other, checked. Then you'll see these appear in the Calendar. As a matter of fact you can even double click and edit them here in the Calendar or when you click the Plus Button or use File then New, you can create a new reminder here in the Calendar App. So if you like the Calendar App better than Reminders you can do it all here. But it had the actual item stored as a reminder instead of as an event. You can even complete items here in the Calendar by clicking on the little circle next to it. Plus, under View, you have a checkbox next to Show Completed Reminders. So if you turn that Off when a reminder is completed it will disappear from your calendar so it doesn't get too cluttered. 

Another option is to use the Clock App and set an alarm. So an alarm has a couple of advantages over an event or reminder. One is that it will be an alert that keeps going, like an alarm should, to make sure you don't miss it. But you can also choose Snooze and use a snooze function here which can be useful. You can kind of schedule alarms a couple of days out by using the set of repeat buttons here. For instance, if it's Monday you can have an alarm that only is going to go off on Thursday at a specific time and then when it does go off just remember to delete or turn off the alarm so it doesn't happen again the next Thursday. You can also label alarms here with a message so you can remember what it is you're supposed to be doing at that time. 

Speaking of repeating things, you can repeat events in the Calendar as well. So for this event here you can set Repeat to, say, everyday, every week, every month on this day and every year on this day if you like. But you could customize it even more. So you can have it be weekly but say on multiple days, like every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. You can also have it be monthly and have it be on certain day every month, you can do every other month if you want. You can have it be on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, next to the last, and all of that day, weekday. You have tons of different options here. You can further customize once you have setup the repeat. For instance, I'll just be every week. So it's going to be every Monday. But if I already know it's not going to happening this Monday I can select it and then press Delete and say only this event. So now it will skip that day. Furthermore, I can go later and say, well this is the last time it's going to happen so I can select the next one, Delete and say delete all future events. So now I've got this repeating event that's just going to happen these six times. This is still just one event. I can go to the first one and delete it and Delete All, and it takes them all away. 

One last thing. Also remember to check in System Settings and then under Notifications to make sure that the Notifications for the Calendar App are turned On and setup as you like. So as you can see there's lots of different ways to customize and get more out of Alerts in the Calendar App. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.