How to hide calendar but receive reminder notifications?

Question

I have a calendar containing only regularly recuring dates. I would like to hide this calendar or these dates from the ordinary Google calendar app and the Google calendar widget.

The reminder notifications of these dates should not be disabled.

I activated synchronization in the Google calendar app and deactivated the display calender. Now the dates do are not being displayed, neither in the app nor in the widget, but I either do not receive the reminder notifications.

P.S. What is the difference between those two settings?

Answer 1

I know the original post is now ancient but I haven't found any recent discussion on this and I believe the behavior is still basically the same. That is, if a calendar is "hidden" on your mobile device, you will not get a notification for any of it's event.

Much like the OP, I wanted to schedule recurring tasks (clean cat litter, take out trash) at specific days/times and then get reminded of them on my phone WITHOUT cluttering up my calendar on web OR android version of google calendar.

I found google tasks to be a great solution to this, as:

1. I can add/modify/view these events on either phone (tasks app) or web* (calendar.google.com)
2. They don't appear at all in android's gcal
3. I can hide them from web gcal and still get notifications

As an added bonus, because the notifications on my phone come from the tasks app (and not gcal) I can set a different notification sound/vibe pattern to differentiate these less important chores from potentially important events. Also, I really like the ability to "mark as complete" as opposed to just dismissing an event notification (this behavior is similar to google reminders, but unlike tasks, hiding reminders from gcal does disable notifications)

Here's a great post on the differences between google tasks and reminders

The one missing piece that I'm still searching for is the ability to share these chores with someone so that, for example, my wife and I can both mark chores as complete and then the other one will know it doesn't need to be done.

*Edit: I just realized you can't create a recurring task from web gcal, but you definitely can from the tasks app (and then still view all of them on web) so this is only a minor annoyance.

Answer 2

The easiest way to achieve this is to install a 3rd party calendar app which uses the Google calendar backend, and tell that app to not show that specific calendar, while leaving it enabled in the default Google calendar app (aCalendar would be a good and relatively light-weight choice here). As the Google calendar is responsible for the alerts, you still would get them (and the corresponding notifications), while its content wouldn't disturb you working with the 3rd party app. I do something similar, and use the mentioned app, so I really can recommend it.

To the detail question: Synchronization is what the name suggests: updating changes made on either side (for a disabled calendar, obviously only in one direction). It's probably separated from (de)activating a calendar so you can activate it up-to-date even when having no network connection -- just my guess, but that would make sense.

Answer 3

An imperfect solution is to use Google Keep (following this suggestion on Reddit).

This means you can't, as I desire, look at Google Calendar and toggle the reminders briefly visible. For that, you could try sharing the reminders-specific calendar with a different Google account and then syncing that account with a 3rd party Calendar app that handles reminders (while still keeping the Google Calendar Android app synced with your main Google account, where the reminders-specific calendar is hidden).

Answer 4

How about having a seperate Google acount and use google tasks on the other one only for those you don't want to pop up in your main calendar?