How To: Remove Unwanted Google Calendars from iOS and Mac

Ben Rimes

For regular readers of my blog (all six of you), it may seem odd that my posts oscillate between “super happy and helpful” and more snarky and pessimistic rants about the current state of ed tech. I apologize for the confusion, but in my defense it is my blog, and I’m not trying to appease any advertisers or demographics (at least not for a long while). That having been said, here’s a post that wraps both of my moods up into one video.

full calendar

I really dislike an over-crowded Calendar. I understand the need to be able to see all of the Google Calendars within my district’s Google Apps for Education Domain. There are times when I need to check on a computer cart in a particular building. There are times when I need to coordinate a meeting with a busy colleague, and see her calendar helps. But I don’t want to see all of those calendars on my mobile device, or the Calendar app on my Macbook, both of which I use frequently to schedule meetings.

I know what you’re saying. Ben, you can simply “uncheck” those calendars on your device so that you can’t see them anymore. The problem is, when you uncheck those calendars, they’re still there. You can’t see them anymore, but any reminders or notification alerts that were attached to the events still flood my notifications list on my Mac and my phone. When you’ve got more than a dozen extra calendars that have been delegated to you, it’s rather annoying. So I put together a quick video to completely remove the extra calendars from being pushed out to your iOS devices and Mac, but still have access to them via the web and Google Apps. If you want the short version, just head over to Google Calendar’s Sync Select page (https://www.google.com/calendar/syncselect), login to your Google Account, and get unchecking!

If you’re in a role similar to mine, working in an Apple-heavy environment, and would like to have at least one restful device that you can access just your own calendar without all of the others, I hope this helps.

30 comments

  1. Thank you!!!! Worked like a charm and I NEVER would have otherwise figured this out… adding calendars was easy but removing them took this video…

    1. Glad it helped! It was a constant frustration for me and many teachers, so I finally had to do the screencast just for my own sake….didn’t want to forget how to do it again 🙂

  2. Thanks, this has really helped me, it was super annoying to see the notifications from past calendars all the time.

  5. This is so close to solving something that is SO FRUSTRATING for me. A previous coworker shared their calendar with me, but it shows up in the ical sidebar under the heading of “calendar.google.com” not the typical “google” calendar heading.

    I can’t for the life of me figure out how to delete this thing (rarrrr!!!), it doesn’t show up in the list when I follow your instructions above, and simply right-click delete gives me a server error repeatedly.

    Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!! Like whoa. Thanks! 🙂

    1. It sounds like you should have had the problem taken care of, Courtney. However, you should be able to solve it by visiting the “settings” of your Calendar through a web browser. Then click on the “Calendars” tab and you can use the “unsubscribe” link next to any calendars you don’t want to see anymore.

  7. Thank you Ben! Our daughter started junior high this year and we were still getting reminders for her old elementary school events (which was charming, but also annoying). This worked great! Thanks!!!

  9. This post is officially my hero post of the year. My co-worker’s calendar notifications were making me nuts.

  12. What a great post. Goodness knows why Mr. Hoppity wanted to share his calendar with me but it no longer appears on the list. Thanks again.

  14. Thanks so much for this, the notifications and alerts from this unused calendar having been driving me insane!

  16. Tried to complete but Google has locked the site so Calendars are Greyed Out and can’t uncheck.

  19. Thanks for this. This was driving me crazy not being able to figure out how to not show calendars!

  20. I feel so ignorant, but better now. Just made the crossover to Apple. Learning…Never going back. Thanks Ben.

  23. Thanks so much. I keep forgetting how to do this but google always gets me back here in terms of how to fix those annoying shared calendar notifications.

  24. Maybe you can help…
    I don’t want to get my event invites to my email as a document, I feel this is all due to the google calendar. What can I do? I have an IPhone. This that I put on my phone calendar I still see it on the google calendar. I don’t want anything there. Please HELP!!

  25. Finally! Thank you so much! This was driving me nuts!

    Although it sucks that you can’t control this from the Calendar app – I would like to be able to be able to check out those calendars from time to time by checking the box, but still avoid getting notifications about their events.

    Btw, the link seems to have changed a bit, so I googled my way to the right page, which apparently now is:

    https://calendar.google.com/calendar/syncselect

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