Enable Google Chrome Desktop Notifications from Gmail

Enable Google Chrome Desktop Notifications from Gmail

Ya know what is really embarassing? Missing a meeting with a group of people you really like working with. Don’t be a James. Get your Gmail notifications on your desktop and be on time for those important, team-bonding sessions.

Get All your notifications

I recently joined the team at Inventive and I’m so geeked to be working with some pretty incredible folks. There is this great combination and balance of humor, humility and “get sh!t done” that is really pushing this old dog to keep up. I love it.

Aaaaaaand then I go and miss two standups in my first week. Good grief, Charlie Brown. I’m thankful that “patience” and “grace” are also in this culture.

Inventive uses the Google apps suite of tools which is new-ish to me for complete workflow. I’ve only really used it once before, and the calendar app and the way they handle meeting notifications has changed. It used to be that Chrome would “pop over” what you were working on with the in-browser alerts. It was more than mildly annoying, but at the same time it kept me on top of my meetings.

But, no excuses. New tooling means new learning, so I had to dig around the new Calendar experience to find the setting I was looking for. I found an [older post] out there which pointed me in the right direction, but the new bits look like, well, different bits, so here I share.

Get to Your Settings

The first step is simply to drill into your calendar settings, so pop over to that app and open that up.

Accessing the settings dialog

Scroll down to the Event Settings under the General header, and select “Desktop Notifications” from the “Notifications” option.

Enable Desktop Notifications

Now, close and restart your browser, then head back to your calendar. Chrome will prompt you to allow desktop notifications. If you say yes (why wouldn’t you at this point?) then you should see the following.

Seeing the notification

There. No more missed standups. The only catch seems to be that when you’re using multiple profiles you’re going to have to open Chrome up with the profile for which you’d like notifications enabled at least once after startup, but this is something you’re likely doing to get your mail and whatnot anyway. Hope this helps!

Happy coding!