Travel time for a meeting that repeats

September 2026

A meeting that repeats needs its travel time to repeat with it. The Tuesday client visit is the same drive every Tuesday; the gym on Mondays and Thursdays is the same twenty minutes each way. Google Calendar will repeat the meeting for you and nothing else. The road stays white space, every week, and the week it matters is the week you are late.

What Google Calendar does with a repeating event

It repeats the event, keeps the location field, and stops there. There is no travel-time setting to repeat. Whatever you do about the drive, you do it again for every occurrence, or you do it once and hope nothing moves.

By hand, and where it breaks

The usual workaround is a second repeating event called "Travel" or "Drive", set to the same rule, half an hour before. It works until the first exception, and there is always an exception:

• One week the meeting moves to the afternoon. The meeting's own rule handles that; your travel event does not. It now protects an hour when you are at your desk, and leaves the hour you are actually driving open for anyone to book.
• One week it is somewhere else. The drive is forty minutes instead of twenty, and your block still says twenty.
• One week it is cancelled. The travel block is not, so you look busy for an hour you are free.
• The series ends or moves an hour later for good. Now you have two series to fix instead of one, and you will remember the second one late.

None of these are hard to fix on their own. The cost is that each one is a small piece of admin that arrives without warning, and the whole point of a repeating meeting was that you stopped thinking about it.

One block that repeats, not fifty

DOFOTT writes a repeating block, not a copy of a block for every occurrence. It reads the meeting's own repetition rule and gives the travel block the same one, so the block repeats exactly as far as the meeting does: if the meeting has no end, neither do the blocks; if it stops after ten times or on a date, so do they. Nothing to top up, and no sixty-day cliff where the blocks quietly stop.

In your calendar it looks like what it is: one travel event before the meeting and one after, repeating, marked free so your own reminders stay quiet.

When one week is different

The series is for the weeks that are the same. A week that is not gets taken out of it and handled on its own:

• You move one occurrence. That date is dropped from the repeating block and gets its own pair of blocks, at the new time, with the travel time for that hour.
• You change the place for one week. Same thing: that occurrence leaves the series and gets its own trip.
• You delete one travel block. It stays deleted for that date only, and never comes back. The other weeks are untouched.
• You cancel one occurrence of the meeting. Its blocks go with it, that week only.

What it cannot do

One duration covers the whole series. The length comes from Google Maps for the hour of a regular occurrence, and every occurrence of that series carries it. A drive that takes twenty minutes in September and thirty in December will say twenty in December too, until something about the meeting changes and the block is rewritten. Asking for a fresh estimate every week would mean rewriting your calendar every week, which is worse.

The exceptions above are where the real numbers show up: an occurrence that leaves the series gets its own estimate, for its own hour.

If you want the manual route in detail, with the traps, here it is. If you would rather not, DOFOTT takes a minute to set up and is free during the beta.