Google Calendar Is Testing Separate Meeting Lengths for Work and Personal Calendars

Every new event in Google Calendar starts at the same length. Set your default to 30 minutes and that’s what you get, whether you’re booking a standup on your work calendar or a two-hour soccer practice on the family one. Code in the latest Android app suggests Google wants to change that.

Android Authority dug through version 2026.38.0-989268529 of Google Calendar for Android and found a default event duration setting that lives inside each individual calendar’s settings, instead of the single global menu used today. Nothing is live yet, and Google hasn’t announced anything.

What the change would look like

Right now, default duration is one setting that applies to every calendar on your account and syncs across your phone and the web. In the version found in the code, you’d open a specific calendar’s settings and choose its default there. Your work calendar could start every event at 15 minutes while your personal calendar defaults to an hour.

Android Authority’s example nails who this is for: “maybe you have a lot of short meetings on your business calendar, but your personal calendar is usually populated with longer events for your kids.”

The catch

As spotted, the per-calendar option appears to replace the global setting rather than sit alongside it. Android Authority says “we’d lose the global option in the process,” and Gadget Hacks describes it as a structural replacement, not an add-on.

That would be the wrong call. People with one or two calendars would suddenly have to set the same value in several places, and anyone subscribed to a stack of shared calendars would face a mess. The obvious design is a global default that individual calendars can override. We hope that’s where Google ends up.

Keep expectations in check, too. Gadget Hacks points out that earlier Calendar teardown finds, like a Birthday chip spotted in 2024, never shipped.

What you can do today

Until this lands, the global setting is still worth tuning, and most people never touch it.

1. On Android: open Google Calendar, tap the menu, go to Settings > General, and pick a Default event duration.
2. On the web: click the gear icon, choose Settings, then General > Event settings, and set the default duration from the dropdown.
3. Turn on Speedy meetings in that same web menu. According to How-To Geek, it trims 30- and 45-minute events by five minutes and longer events by 10, which buys you a breather between back-to-back calls.

Why it matters

Default event length sounds like trivia. But it’s a value you accept dozens of times a week without thinking, and a bad default means either dragging the end time every single time or letting meetings quietly swell to fill an hour. Separate defaults for separate calendars would fix a real friction point for anyone running a job and a household from the same phone.

Just don’t take away the master switch, Google.

Sources: Android Authority, Gadget Hacks, How-To Geek. Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.