How to add buffer time between meetings in Google Calendar

Published 14 October 2026

Your calendar shows a meeting from 10:00 to 11:00 downtown and another from 11:00 to 12:00 across town. As far as Google Calendar™ is concerned, all is well: the two don't overlap. As far as you are concerned, they do: the drive between them takes twenty-five, maybe forty minutes at that hour, and those minutes are nowhere in the calendar.

This guide covers three ways to put space between back-to-back meetings: Google Calendar™'s own setting, a buffer you add yourself, and, when the two meetings are in different places, travel time. Which one fits depends on how many addresses your day runs through. If clients book you through a Google Calendar™ booking page, the details are in buffer time in booking pages.

Why two adjacent meetings aren't adjacent

The gap between meetings does two different jobs.

One is breathing room. Leaving one meeting, writing your notes, getting a glass of water, opening the file for the next one. You need it even when both meetings are in the same room, and it is more or less fixed: five, ten minutes.

The other is the road. When the meetings are in different places, the gap is the time it takes to get from one to the other. That isn't fixed: it depends on the address, the hour and whether you drive or take the train. The same two addresses can be forty minutes apart at nine in the morning and twenty at noon.

Google Calendar™'s own tools cover the first job. The second needs something else. Google's way first.

Option 1: Google Calendar's "Speedy meetings"

Google Calendar™ can leave a gap by ending the meetings you create a little early. The setting is in Google Calendar™ on a computer:

1. Click the gear at the top right and open "Settings".
2. Under "General" on the left, go to "Event settings".
3. Under "Default duration", tick "Speedy meetings".

From then on, the meetings you create open a little shorter: in the setting's own words, 30-minute meetings end five minutes early and longer meetings ten minutes early. A 30-minute meeting becomes 25, an hour becomes 50.

Where it stops:

• Only meetings you create. An invitation from someone else arrives at the length they chose. If half your day is other people's invitations, half your day has no gap.
• Existing meetings stay as they are. The setting applies from now on.
• The length is fixed. Five or ten minutes. Enough to change rooms, not enough to cross town.
• The gap is up to the room. The calendar says the meeting ends at 10:50; whether it does is up to whoever runs it.

If your day is spent in one building, or mostly online, this setting alone is enough. Turn it on and take your five minutes back.

Option 2: a buffer event, by hand

Cruder, but it works on other people's invitations too: put an event of your own between two meetings. Click the gap in your calendar, type "Prep" or "Break", make it fifteen minutes. Leave it as "Busy"; new events in Google Calendar™ are busy by default.

If a meeting repeats every week, repeat its buffer the same way: fifteen minutes every Monday at 11:00, after the Monday meeting at 10:00.

One thing in its favour: the buffer shows as busy to everyone who sees your calendar. A colleague looking at your availability won't put a meeting in those fifteen minutes.

The downsides are just as plain:

• When the meeting moves, the buffer doesn't. Move the 11:00 meeting to 11:30 and the buffer stays where it was, guarding the wrong slot.
• When the meeting is cancelled, the buffer stays. Nobody remembers to delete it.
• It gets forgotten. In a busy week, adding buffers is the first thing to go.
• The length is still fixed. You pick fifteen minutes; it knows nothing about the road.

Different address? You need travel time, not a buffer

A fixed ten minutes is a generous gap between two meetings in one building. In a city it is often too short, and sometimes needlessly long:

• Across the river by ferry or train. Walk to the pier or the station, wait, cross, walk to the meeting. The crossing itself is short; door to door it can take three quarters of an hour, more if you just miss the boat.
• A short drive at lunchtime. Fifteen minutes on the map; add the office car park, finding a space and getting past security, and a fixed ten-minute buffer still falls short.
• The same two addresses, a different hour. The road at 8:30 and the road at 13:00 are not the same road. A fixed buffer can't see the difference.

So when two meetings are in different places, the gap is set by the address, the hour and how you travel. The way to add that to Google Calendar™ by hand is the map preview on a computer: get directions from the meeting's location and "Add to calendar" opens an event covering the trip before the meeting. Step by step in how to add travel time to Google Calendar. Don't drop the breathing room either: travel time gets you to the door, getting ready for the meeting takes a few minutes more.

The automatic option: DOFOTT

Adding travel by hand has every downside of a buffer event: the meeting moves and the trip stays put, the way back is a separate step, and every new meeting starts from scratch. DOFOTT is an app that does it for you.

You connect Google Calendar™ once and say where you leave from. From then on every meeting with a location gets a travel block before and after it, timed by Google Maps™ for that day and hour.

• It moves with the meeting. Drag the meeting to another time and the block follows within seconds. Delete the meeting and the block goes too.
• It measures from the meeting before. If there is no time to go home or back to the office between two meetings, the trip to the second starts from the first: where you really are.
• The breathing room is there too. In settings you can add five, ten or fifteen minutes to every trip: parking, the lift, finding the door. Both jobs done at once; the road varies, the margin doesn't.
• It looks at traffic again. For trips by car it asks about today's traffic an hour and a half and half an hour before you leave, and moves the block earlier if it must. More in how we keep travel blocks live.
• One series for a weekly meeting. A meeting in the same place every week gets one repeating block.

What it doesn't do, which you should know:

• It only writes to Google Calendar™. If you live in Outlook or Apple Calendar, it is no use to you.
• No location, no block; nor for a location that is only a Zoom or Meet link.
• No block between two meetings in the same building; a trip under three minutes isn't a trip. There, Speedy meetings or a buffer event is what gives you breathing room.
• It never shortens, moves or touches your meetings. It only writes its own blocks.

Twelve meetings with a place a month are free. In a month you go past that it is $5 + tax and the rest of that month is unlimited; or $36 + tax a year. Details on the pricing page.

Which one fits

Most people's days are a mix of the three. Turning on Speedy meetings costs nothing; make it the first step. On the days your week takes you to different addresses, let the road set the gap.

Does Google Calendar add a gap between meetings automatically?

Partly. With Speedy meetings on, the meetings you create end five or ten minutes early. It puts no event in between, and it takes no account of the trip between two meetings in different places.

Does Speedy meetings shorten other people's invitations?

No. It changes the length of new meetings you create. An invitation from someone else arrives at the length they chose.

How much time should I leave between meetings?

In the same building, five or ten minutes is usually enough. In different places, the gap is the trip: what Google Maps™ gives for that hour, plus a few minutes to park and get in.

How do I add travel time between two meetings in different places?

On a computer, open the meeting, use the map preview next to the location, get directions and choose "Add to calendar". To have it done for every meeting with a location, DOFOTT writes a travel block before and after each one, measured from the meeting before when you go straight on.

Google Calendar™ and Google Maps™ are trademarks of Google LLC.