Google Calendar celebrates 10th birthday with new goals feature

Google Calendar turns 10 years old today. To celebrate, Google has added a new goals feature to the service.

As its name implies, the new functionality lets you set a personal goal in Google Calendar, which then does the dirty work of finding time in your schedule so that you can hit your objective. While Goals is available in all countries and languages where Google Calendar works, it is mobile-only, a Google spokesperson tells me, so you’ll need to update your Android or iOS app from Google Play or Apple’s App Store.

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To set a goal (it can be anything that occurs regularly), you’ll have to answer two important questions: “how often?” and “best time?” Google Calendar does the rest: It will find the best windows to pencil in your new goal.

The best part is that your goals will automatically adjust their timing throughout the week. Google Calendar will automatically reschedule if you add another event that’s a direct conflict with a given goal:

Google Calendar also lets you defer a goal at any time. But, that doesn’t mean you get to slack. Google Calendar will automatically make time for it later.

In fact, Google says that Calendar gets better at scheduling the more you use it. The new feature uses machine learning to improve — every time you defer, edit, or complete your goals, Google Calendar gets a little better at choosing times for them.

In December, Google Calendar received a new reminders feature, also on Android and iOS first. The feature arrived on the Web earlier this month, so we would suspect Goals will follow a similar schedule.

It appears that Google is experimenting with building out Calendar to make it a lot more useful than current services, which are really basic digital agendas. Indeed, Google today declared that “Calendars should help you make the most of your time — not just be tools to track events.”

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Now the company just has to convince Google Calendar users to start using the new features. “Google, remind me to set a goal for myself, sometime next week.”