Shared calendars and popups I have popup notifications appearing anytime my girlfriend has one on the calendar she shares with me. 

Since sharing the calendars avoids me calling her in the middle of a work session, when she's highly concentrated, I'm really unmotivated to remove her calendar from my iPad. 

Since she needs the notifications to know when to move from one activity to the other, we can't turn that off either.

The Mac's iCal has a feature "ignore alerts". Where is the equivalent in iPad?
Use the Do Not Disturb feature to disable alerts during a specific time of day. A good explanation of the feature is given here.