Life-changing apps are few and far between: Angry Birds certainly changed (ruined?) the way we spent our free time. Uber made it alarmingly easy to never take the bus ever again. But... a calendar? Is Google having a laugh?
On the face of it, the Google Calendar app is a very functional offering. One of the best, in fact: it's clean, easy to navigate, links seamlessly with a bunch of other apps like Gmail and Facebook. But 'life-changing'?
Google believes its new feature, 'Goals', can help you change your life for the better. It works like this: hit the big 'plus' symbol in Google Calendar and click 'Goal', setting yourself a life-enhancing task - either from a list of presets including 'go to the gym', 'learn a skill' or 'do yoga', or creating a custom goal - and then set a schedule as to how many times you want to achieve that task per week.
The app will then look for free moments in your schedule, dropping these tasks in for you and sending you a notification when it's time to do that thing you want to do.
Should you be busy, you can hit 'Defer', at which point the app will move it to another available slot. Should you keep deferring during a particular point of the week, the app will learn to stop scheduling things in for that moment.
Now, all this life improvement hinges on two important factors. Firstly, that you use Google Calendar over and above all other calendars (it's not great at syncing with Outlook, for instance), and secondly, that you're actually going to go to the damn gym.
We're enjoying it so far. We're yet to defer one of our "Play video games" goals...
