calendar alerts are terribly broken

There are few things making me think of returning apple watch, but how broken the calendar alerts is up there. As near as I can tell you will not receive an alert on your phone if you are on your Mac and have Outlook open and get a meeting reminder there. However, like most people I have Outlook open all day - sometimes i am walking around my office, at the whiteboard, talking on the phone, and generally not paying attention to my monitor, or I'm out of my office grabbing lunch or talking to a colleague. In those moments I was really hoping apple watch would be a notification I couldn't miss about upcoming meetings - a nice 15m reminder followed by a 1m reminder - but nope! It seems only if my phone is not being used and my computer is sleeping do i get alerts on my watch.

It honestly feels like the whole alert and taptic system is buggy as **** - I've received probably 10 notifications with haptics since I got this thing 6 days ago (not including messages which seems to work fine) - I was hoping to have to tame notification overload, instead I'm missing more than when I only had my phone.

Anybody else have any luck getting notifications to come through consistently and accurately?