Google Calendar and travel time: what is missing, and what it costs

September 2026

A calendar with a location field but no travel time makes one promise it cannot keep: that you are free until the meeting starts. You are not. You are in a car, on a train, or walking, and the calendar shows white space where the road is. Everyone who can see your free time books it.

What Google Calendar gives you

A location field with autocomplete, a link that opens the place in Google Maps, and, in Google Workspace, a working-location setting that says which office you are in. None of these change your availability. The meeting starts at ten; your day shows you free at nine forty-five; and at nine forty-five you are on the motorway.

Apple Calendar has had a travel-time setting since 2013: it asks where you start, computes the trip and shades it on the day. Google has not added one. Whatever the reason, the effect is the same: in Google Calendar, travel time is something you add by hand, one way, with a number you guessed.

What it costs

• Back-to-back meetings in different places. The second one starts late, every time, and it looks like your fault.
• The return trip. Nobody blocks it. The hour after an off-site meeting fills up with calls you take from the road.
• Moved meetings. A meeting moves, the travel block you made does not, and now it protects the wrong hour.
• The guess. "About twenty minutes" was true at two in the afternoon. At five it is forty.

A notification is not a block

Some phones can tell you when it is time to leave. That helps you, and only you. It does not stop a colleague from booking the slot, it does not show in a shared calendar, and it does not move the meeting after it. The fix has to live in the calendar itself, as time that is visibly taken.

What a real fix needs

1. Real durations, from a routing service, for the hour the trip happens, not a number typed once.
2. Both directions. Getting there and getting back.
3. It follows the event. Move it, resize it, change the room, cancel it: the blocks change with it, without you.
4. It never edits your events. It writes its own blocks and nothing else, and it can prove which ones are its own.
5. It knows where you are. Trips during the work day start from the office, the rest from home.
6. It gets out of the way. For a flight, or when you are already there, one click and no block.

How DOFOTT does it

DOFOTT connects to your Google account once, reads the calendars you tick, and writes a block before and after every event that has a location. The lengths come from Google Maps for that time of day, with traffic. The blocks are normal calendar events marked "free" for you, so your own reminders stay quiet, and they show wherever your Google Calendar shows. When an event moves, its blocks move within seconds; when it goes, they go. Each block links to a small page for that one trip: travel mode, starting address, return or no travel at all. A weekly meeting gets one recurring block.

Its limits are also clear. It works with Google Calendar only. It needs a location on the event; a meeting called "Lunch" with no place gets nothing. And it never asks you to type a duration, which is deliberate: the guess is the problem.

Setting it up takes a minute and is free during the beta. If you would rather keep doing it by hand, here is how, with the traps to avoid.