Oh you use notifications? lol for the entire ten minutes preceding anything on my calendar i have to blast a pink stay-on-top banner across the center of my screen to get my attention

people asking how, mac only, sorry:

set this thing up https://github.com/insanum/gcalcli (hassle) and get it to print out your reminder with ‘“gcalcli --calendar whatever-your-calendar-is-called remind 5 "echo %s”’

blast it with https://www.tynsoe.org/v2/geektool/ (weird as heck) every 30 seconds