How to Automatically Block Travel Time in Google Calendar (in 5 Minutes)

You don’t need a personal assistant to keep your calendar realistic. You need your calendar to understand geography.

If you’ve ever booked back-to-back meetings across town and spent the next hour doing mental math like “Can I teleport from this café to that office in 5 minutes?”, you know the pain. One of our users, Nikki, used to solve this by asking a PA to manually add “travel time” blocks between meetings so her week didn’t collapse the moment she left her desk.

Notis can do that automatically.

The idea: travel time should be booked like a real meeting

When a new appointment hits your calendar, Notis can calculate how long it actually takes to get there, then reserve that time before and after the meeting. It does this based on the meeting location and your rules around transportation. The end result is simple: your week becomes physically possible again.

What you need (and why this takes five minutes)

You’ll need a Google Calendar connected to Notis, your home address, and a few minutes to set the plumbing once. After that, your calendar maintains itself.

Step 1: create a dedicated “Travel Blocker” calendar

Start in Google Calendar and create a new calendar specifically for travel buffers. Name it “Travel Blocker” so it’s obvious what’s going on.

Then open that calendar’s settings and copy the Calendar ID. This is the calendar Notis will write to, which keeps your primary calendar clean while still showing travel time in the right places.

Step 2: create the Notis automation

Head to the Notis portal and create a new automation. Call it “Travel Planning” so you can find it later.

In the automation prompt, paste your prompt template and customize the two key parts: replace the placeholder for your address with your actual home base, and replace the placeholder for the calendar id with the Calendar ID you copied from Google Calendar.

From there, you can set the rules that matter to you, like your transportation preferences. This is where you decide whether you want Notis to assume you’re taking public transport, driving, walking, or switching modes depending on the context.

Step 3: set up the triggers (this is what makes it automatic)

Choose the trigger type as Integrations, then pick Google Calendar from your default connected account.

You’ll create two triggers: one for when an event is created, and one for when an event is cancelled or deleted. This matters because a travel-time system is only useful if it stays accurate when your schedule inevitably changes.

If you use multiple calendars for booking, you can add additional triggers for each calendar you want Notis to watch.

Save the automation.

How it works once it’s live

Notis maintains three kinds of travel blockers throughout your day.

The first is the travel time from home to your first meeting.

The second is the travel time between consecutive meetings.

The third is the travel time from your last meeting back home.

When you create a meeting, Notis reads the location, calculates the travel time, and creates the corresponding blocks inside your “Travel Blocker” calendar. It also chooses a transport mode based on the rules you defined.

When you modify or delete a meeting, Notis adjusts the travel blocks accordingly, so you don’t end up with phantom travel time sitting in your week.

Test it in two minutes

Create a meeting on Monday at 10:00 at a café and make sure the location is set.

Then create another meeting later that day in a different place.

You should see travel blocks appear automatically around those meetings.

Now add a third meeting between the first two and watch what happens: Notis recalculates the travel blockers so the whole day still makes sense end-to-end.

A few customizations that make this feel magical

If you live somewhere like Paris, you might prefer public transport downtown and a car outside the center. That kind of logic is exactly what you can encode in your automation rules.

You can also make the system quieter. A good default is to have Notis message you only when something goes wrong, or when the calculated travel time is longer than the time available between meetings. In other words, you only get pinged when your week is about to become impossible again.

The real win: a calendar you can trust

Most calendar tools assume time is flat. Real life isn’t.

Once travel time is booked automatically, you stop negotiating with your schedule and start operating inside it. That’s the difference between a calendar that looks productive and a calendar that actually works.

If you want to set this up in Notis, we made a step by step guide for you here.