As Google celebrated its tenth birthday this past week, it decided to give its own gift to the world: Google Goals. Google and its extremely successful calendar app have now given birth to another creative endeavor to help you organize your life.
Google Goals was created to help people reach their long-term goals in the midst of busy lifestyles, but how can we really benefit from such an app?
The company wanted to recognize that most of us have long-term goals for our lives but often fail to achieve them because of time mismanagement.
Image from Google
We theoretically allocate time to our new hobbies, pursuits or lifestyle changes, but, in reality, they are rarely acted upon. How many of us have made commitments or New Year’s resolutions to exercise more, pick up a new instrument or spend more time in prayerful meditation?
Perhaps we should ask an even better question: How many of us have followed through?
The new goals feature is designed around the premise that if something is on our schedule (or our Google calendar), we will be more apt to complete the assigned task.
By examining the more important appointments already listed on your calendar, Google Goals strives to fill in the space that surrounds those appointments. If you have an hour after lunch before your next doctor’s appointment, you might find yourself scheduled to spend that time practicing your verb conjugations in German.
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How Does It Work?
How does the app know how much time you need or want to devote to your new goals to improve yourself? You can set the time commitment within the new Google Goals program to identify how many times per week you would like to see your activity pop up on the calendar, for how long, and even which time of day works best for you.
If you arrange for Wednesday nights to spend a little time on yourself but instead opt to go out to dinner with friends, it isn’t a big deal. The algorithms within the Google Goals function will allow you to defer your self-improvement to a later time or another date. As you continue to use the app, the algorithm within Google Calendar begins to take note of which time slots work better for you and tends to favor these spots, when possible, around your pre-existing meetings and appointments.
When you originally set your time preference for your newly scheduled activities, the Google Goals algorithm tries to assign tasks to these spots. If it notices that you continuously defer or just cancel your goals appointments during these times, it uses machine learning to modify the algorithm to exclude specific time spots.
By taking away times that have proven to be inconvenient for you, Google Goals helps you to eliminate the excuses you’ve been saving up for why you haven’t reached your goals yet.
Google Goals Might Not Be for You
Are you a little more relaxed with your scheduling? Since the Google Goals app revolves around making the best use of your free time, it is really only effective for those users who religiously log their appointments in their current Google Calendar feature.
Google Goals wants to help you streamline your day into neat and tidy chunks of time to maximize the hours you’re available for work and leisure time. If you tend to leave your appointments off the calendar, favoring memory or a traditional paper planner instead of a digital version, the Google Goals feature won’t be much help to you.
However, with all of the benefits in allowing your technology to schedule and send reminder prompts to complete your goals, it might be worth the transition to stricter usage of your Google Calendar app.
There is a definite benefit to having all of your appointments in one place: you are more organized and prepared for your set activities throughout the day. With most of us becoming increasingly dependent upon our smartphones and other technology, Google Calendar and Google Goals are striving to create less cumbersome technology and more streamlined lifestyles.
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Should We Give Google More Information?
Image from Google
In an era where we must be at least moderately concerned about the amount of information stored about us on servers from large companies like Google, should we continue to add our personal information and whereabouts into the Google Calendar (and, now, Google Goals) system?
Google certainly enjoys healthy revenue streams from its advertisers, but, according to The New York Times, its primary business is data collection – data that comes from our personal information. Google uses the data you put within its apps to sell advertisements as well as improve computer algorithms and artificial intelligence. But what happens when that data is used for something less positive?
Hackers may, one day, find their way deep into the vaults of personal information that Google has stored on its servers. Along with all of our sensitive email information from the Google Gmail account, hackers would have access to our daily whereabouts, what times of day we are typically free, and the type of self-improvement projects we’re currently hard at work on.
By continuing to add more and more items to our Google Calendar apps and now the new Google Goals app, only available on mobile devices, are we providing them with even more of our very valuable personal information?
What are the potential downfalls of having so much of our personal lives freely available on the Internet to major organizations like Google?
With the continued improvement in personal time-management apps like this one, the end result remains to be seen. It could certainly be an improvement for us as individuals, but, as a society, we may want to closely monitor how much of our personal information is readily available to potential hackers who wind their way through Google’s security system.
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Behavioral Science at Its Finest
Google’s acquisition of the time-management app Timeful has brought behavioral science concepts from its founder Ariely into the new Google Goals function. How can we keep focused on our long-term goals with so many distractions right in front of us?
Google and the founder of Timeful are attempting to create the solution: make one automated decision that repeats itself until it becomes a habit. As Forbes contributor Elizabeth Harris notes, making time for your goals is very similar to saving for retirement. Individuals who have automated contributions to a 401(k) or other retirement savings plan typically enjoy more success when it comes to their long-term retirement savings goals.
In a similar fashion, individuals who make one automatic decision to add their new hobby, downtime or lifestyle change into the Google Goals app may find they will enjoy more long-term success with their goals.
Instead of losing sight of the long-term goals when distractions or other appointments arise, Google Goals allows you to defer your scheduled “goal time” to a later date and time so that it’s impossible to be forgotten.
When we create goals, we don’t often label them with specific time frames, but the new Google Goals feature gives tangible next steps to making those goals achievable. Users of the new app can move from abstract ideas of “get more exercise” to “run on the treadmill three times per week for thirty minutes.” Google Goals forces us to put time commitments and specifics to our abstract ideas, giving us more incentive to actually reach a very achievable goal.
Image from Google
What’s the Ultimate Goal?
With all of Google’s emphasis on how the new Google Goals app will fit neatly within the confines of the pre-existing and popular Google Calendar app, what is really the ultimate goal? With its direct connection to the previous app, Timeful, the new Google Goals aims to be your new “first-rate executive assistant” that can “anticipate needs, prioritize objectives, [and] optimize your time.”
The ultimate goal of Google’s new program is to help busy people spend more time on things they care about, according to Google Calendar’s director of product, Alex Gawley. As some will point out, the Google Goals feature might make us feel as though we are achieving far more than we did before, but we might not be gaining as much as we think.
Many of us make resolutions year-round, but they are oftentimes very abstract concepts. We might say we want to become better friends or to make ourselves available more often for our family. How can you assign a goal like this onto your calendar?
The reality is that you can’t.
Google Goals can only ultimately help you with what some would call “practicable” goals, taking away a very important element of self-improvement. When we rely on technology to prompt and remind us that we have made goals for ourselves, we can become less and less likely to remember these abstract goals that come with no prompts from our smartphones throughout the day.
Does Google Goals Make Us Better People?
It seems that Google Goals is well on track to making us better people – or at least people who are more mindful of our goals and how they may fit into an already busy schedule. What are the odds that we will follow through on these new appointments on our calendar that ask us to carve out time for ourselves?
While there are definitely some drawbacks to the new Google Goals app, it might be just the sort of prompting that some people require to actually work towards their achievable goals. The major downside is that artificial intelligence still has no way to help us work towards those more abstract goals that we make for ourselves.
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If you’re already on the path to tracking each and every appointment and meeting throughout your day on the Google Calendar app, the new Goals function will likely work beautifully to help you practice new goals.
However, without strict diligence and commitment to marking down your immovable appointments, you probably won’t see many results on your long-term goals. You’ll likely find yourself deferring the appointments Google Goals sets for you without giving it any real quantifiable data for what dates or times would work better.
Does the new Google Goals app have the potential to transform us into better, more goal-oriented individuals? Absolutely – if we can manage to allow it to make the most of our days.
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