Is there a way to set a daily reminder without it cluttering up my Calendar?

Question

In Google Calendar is there a way to set a daily reminder without it cluttering up my Calendar?

e.g. Say I need to take my vitamin pills every morning at 7 am (just a hypothetical example I made up). I need a reminder that I can address with some flexibility (i.e. Not an alarm that keeps ringing) and this also makes sure that if I all I miss it in the morning I can then keep the notification pending and mark it as done in the evening when I do get back home.

I can set it up as a recurring event in Google Calender that repeats daily with a notification but then it unnecessarily clutters up the UI.

i.e. If I print or browse my schedule etc. this shows up as a event every day. That's not what I want.

I just want a daily notification. I tried to make this its separate calendar and then hide it which works to unclutter the Schedule view etc. as intended. But unfortunately, as soon as I hide it the notification does not trigger at all.

Any ideas how this can be done? If at all it can be done.

Answer 1

I don't know of a way to do this on your phone, but on your computer you can at least hide the event on the calendar (although using this approach other events are still sized by the event) using a userscript.

Essentially the approach is to find all calendar events of the type specified when the page loads and when the DOM changed and hide them. Here's one way:

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Google calendar event hider
// @namespace    https://zachsaucier.com/
// @version      0.1
// @description  Hide calendar events specified
// @author       Zach Saucier
// @match        https://calendar.google.com/calendar/*
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
    'use strict';

    var eventList = [
        "Test event"
    ];

    // The actual functionality to remove the events
    function hideEventsInList() {
        var spans = document.querySelectorAll(".cpchip span, .chip-caption span");

        for(var i = 0; i < spans.length; i++) {
            var span = spans[i];
            for(var j = 0; j < eventList.length; j++) {
                 if(span.innerText.indexOf(eventList[j]) > -1) {
                     var parent = span.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode;
                     parent.parentNode.removeChild(parent);
                 }
            }
        }
    }
    hideEventsInList();

    var observeDOM = (function() {
        var MutationObserver = window.MutationObserver || window.WebKitMutationObserver,
            eventListenerSupported = window.addEventListener;

        return function(obj, callback) {
            if(MutationObserver) {
                // Define a new observer
                var obs = new MutationObserver(function(mutations, observer){
                    if(mutations[0].addedNodes.length || mutations[0].removedNodes.length )
                        callback();
                });
                // Have the observer observe foo for changes in children
                obs.observe(obj, {childList: true, subtree: true});
            }
            else if(eventListenerSupported ) {
                obj.addEventListener('DOMNodeInserted', callback, false);
                obj.addEventListener('DOMNodeRemoved', callback, false);
            }
        };
    })();

    // Observe a specific DOM element:
    observeDOM(document.body.querySelector("#mainbody"), function() { 
        hideEventsInList();
    });
})();

I also uploaded this to GreasyFork for easy install here.

Answer 2

A partial solution could be to set one weekly event on the last week day (or last week work day), and then add several notifications to it: on time; one day before; two days before and so on.

Answer 3

In my galaxy phone, I went to my calendar, then the menu, then 'manage calendars' and at the bottom it says 'App Events' I noticed Reminders was listed so I turned it off. Now my reminders aren't cluttering up my calendar and I still get notified of them each day.

Answer 4

1. Make a new Google calendar just for these reminders. It will, of course, show up with all your other calendars on the left. Give it its own name and color.
2. Put at least one reminder in this calendar to test.
3. Check the little color swatch just to the left of the calendar's name. This will hide any events under that calendar. However, if you add an alarm or alarms, you will still see those just as you do for other events with alarms.
4. Check or uncheck the calendars' color swatch to edit or hide.

Answer 5

Not sure if you have a Samsung watch? (If you haven't already found a solution?) When I created a daily reminder on my phone (note 10), the reminder showed up as a block on every day. For some reason though, when I created one in the reminder app on my Samsung watch, it only shows as a block for the next day on my calendar. I'm assuming this block will then move to the next day once I click completed as it is set to remind every day.I can live with that but having it blocked off every day just made a mess.