Goals in Google Calendar helps users make time for the things that are important to them – like fitting in more exercise. Florian Goerisch, Product Manager at Google, tells Kate Cracknell how it works

What’s the thinking behind Goals in Google Calendar?
We heard from our users that they often have so much going on, it can be hard to find time for the things that are important to them – especially if those things require sustained investment, such as learning a new language or improving their health and fitness.

Research from behavioural science told us that, if we could get people to schedule time for these activities in their calendar, they were much more likely to actually do them. But constantly scheduling and rescheduling time in your calendar is a pain, so we wanted to offer them an easier solution.

And so the idea of Goals in Google Calendar was born. Goals is a feature in Google Calendar that helps you achieve your goals by automatically scheduling them for you, based on your preferences and when you have open slots in your calendar. It uses cutting-edge machine intelligence to do the scheduling for you – harnessing the power of commitment, while maintaining the dynamism and flexibility that people need in their busy lives.

What sort of goals can people set?
There are five broad categories: exercising, building a skill, spending time with family and friends, creating ‘me’ time, or just having time to organise your life and stay on top of things. But if your desired goal doesn’t quite fit into any of those categories, you can also create a custom goal.

What’s the most popular type of goal?
Our data shows that exercise goals are the most common: about 20 per cent of users set working out as a goal, while running is a goal set by 10 per cent of users.
The most frequent duration for exercise goals is a 60 minute session in the evenings.

How do you set a goal?
For the end user, Goals is very straightforward to set up. You don’t need to provide background information – you just tell Goals what you want to do and it helps you schedule it to make it happen.

To use Goals, simply open the Google Calendar app and:

• In the bottom right corner, tap ‘Create’.

• Then tap ‘Goal’ and choose a category – for example, Exercise or Friends & Family. To create a custom goal, just pick a category, then tap ‘Custom’.

• Follow the directions on your screen to set up your goal. For example, if you choose exercise as your goal, Goals will ask you what sort of exercise, how often you want to do it, for how long, and what time of day is best for you. It allows you to clearly define your goal.

• Then you tap ‘Done’ – and that’s it.

Sessions will be automatically added to your calendar, starting with the first four weeks. You can adjust the time or length of these events at any time. For more information, see www.health-club.co.uk/goals

What happens when there’s a scheduling clash?
We’ve designed Calendar to help you adjust in a number of ways when the unexpected comes up and gets in the way of you achieving your goals. For example, Calendar will automatically reschedule if you add another event that’s in direct conflict with your goal. Calendar also gets better at scheduling the more you use it – just defer, edit or complete your goals as normal and, using machine intelligence, Calendar will choose even better times in the future.

Does Goals actually work?
The Calendar team performed a longitudinal study examining the benefits of using Goals, how the usage of Goals changed over time, as well as how it affected users’ goal-related behaviour. While we can’t reveal the full results of the study yet, the data certainly shows that Goals prompts people to spend more time on their goals.

Goals users also report higher levels of success in achieving their goals. Anecdotally, we’ve heard a number of great stories about how people have accomplished their goals thanks to the feature.

Does Goals incorporate any motivational tools to encourage people to stick to their plans?
No, not at the moment. If you share your calendar, then those who have access will be able to see your scheduled goals, but they only have view-access. They can’t see whether you completed or deferred them.

How smart is Google Goals – how much does it learn about you and your habits?
Goals in Calendar is a machine learning feature, which means it gets better based on your interactions with it over time.

As a user, you set your initial preferences when you first create a goal (number of times a week, duration and so on). With this information, your user profile is created and your goals are scheduled, avoiding conflicts with other meetings.

These goals will automatically move as conflicts occur with other calendar events. However, if a user manually moves a goal (to a specific time, for example, or to the weekend), Google’s machine learning algorithms will recognise the pattern and add it as a signal to your profile. Additional signals are also taken into account, such as if you mark a session as done or manually defer it. In this way your profile is built up, and this is taken into account for the scheduling of future sessions. For example, if the signals are strong enough, all future sessions will be moved to the particular day/time to which you’ve manually moved a goal.

Does Google Goals have any way of checking a goal has been achieved?
Goals relies on the interaction between the user and the Calendar app, so self-reporting is the primary way in which the feature operates.

Are there plans to further develop Goals?
We’re always considering ways to better the user experience, which might include adding more features to Goals in Google Calendar. That said, we don’t have anything specific to share at the moment. Stay tuned!