Google Adds Goals to Calendar

Google announced a new feature this morning for Google Calendar, providing users with an automated way to schedule personal goals into your schedule. With Goals, Google Calendar can find time for working out, learning a new language, and other goals.

Available today via updates to the Android and iOS versions of the Google Calendar app—I don’t think it will hit the web version immediately, but then I’m not seeing the update anywhere at the moment—Goals works simply enough: Just add a personal goal and Calendar will find a place in your schedule for it.

Based on a video introduction to the feature, you add a goal by press the round “New” button and then selecting Goal from the pop-up choices. (Where Goal adds to the previous choices of Event and Reminder.)

Then, you select a goal, answer a few questions ((like “How often?” “How long?” and “Best time?”), and off you go: Google Calendar will find time in your schedule and it as needed, each week, dynamically.

Goals are smart too. If you explicitly schedule an event at a time Calendar had chosen for a goal, it will move that goal automatically. You defer goals. And as you defer, edit and complete goals, Calendar will choose the optimal times for those goals moving forward. Automatically.

This feature looks really useful, and highlights the point I was making inAndroid for the Windows Guy: Google Apps to Embrace over the weekend: Yes, I get that you as a Microsoft guy may have a natural aversion to Google, but they do some good stuff. And by putting goals—and reminders, and tasks—in a single place with appointments and other events, Google has also done something very natural: I don’t want separate apps for everything. Having one place to go for all schedule-based items just makes sense.

Here’s that video. It’s worth watching.