Can small changes to your calendar have big effects on your behavior?
One of the biggest challenges behavioral scientists are tackling these days is helping us balance short-term demands with long-term goals. The urgency of, say, a meeting with your boss in an hour, understandably trumps a long-term goal of meditating more. This crowding-out, they say, is among the biggest reasons why we have a tough time accomplishing things we’d love to do, but somehow never find time to focus on.
Enter
This week the company announced a new feature, called Goals, to their insanely popular Google Calendar. Goals allows you to direct Google Calendar to fill in unscheduled hours with time devoted to work toward more personal goals, such as exercise more, learn a new language or read more.
“Calendars should help you make the most of your time—not just be tools to track events,” Google chirped in a blog post announcing Goals. “So as Google Calendar turns 10 today we’re excited to invest in more updates like Goals, and to help you find time for everything that matters—from your daily must-dos, to exercising more, to just a little ‘me time.’”
Google bought time-management app Timeful, of which Ariely was a founder, last year, so it’s no surprise that they’ve integrated his ideas about applying behavioral science concepts to real-life issues. Among them: the challenge of keeping a long-term view in mind when short-term temptations, such as advertising or even phone apps (or those more urgent meetings) may divert our attention from what’s best for us in the long run, as Ariely told me during an interview last December.
“What they want from you is not your long-term well-being,” Ariely said then. “What they want is your time, money and attention right now.”
There’s also tremendous evidence from investor behavior in 401(k) plans that committing to working toward a long-term goal in the future (such as saving more tomorrow) is extremely effective. Make just one choice, automating a decision has huge benefits – such as automatically enrolling employees in 401(k) plans as a default option – and in this case, specifying a long-term goal once, and your calendar will do the rest.
And as an update, Ariely tells me today: “If you think about this idea more generally, not just about goals, but flexibile types of time commitments that you declare what you want in general, but the specific instant and the way it’s placed in your calendar is going to be helped by some algorithmic approach by the calendar, it’s a very exciting future. It doesn’t have an exact start time and end time, but they nevertheless take some time and you want to keep them in your mind.”
Behavioral science economics concepts have already been embraced by everyone from the U.S. government to companies and agencies around the globe (including, as I reported earlier this year, the World Bank). With Goals, these ideas have suddenly graduated to one of the world’s largest potential pools of test subjects. While Google doesn’t release figures on how many people actively use Calendar, Goals will likely become part of life for millions of people around the world by the end of the week.
In addition to addressing the gap between short-term and long-term goals, the calendar function names the goal. Much like naming a savings account as “my future home fund” or “my future business account,” it identifies the purpose. When you name something, such as a savings account as Ariely tells me here, “What kind of changes might you make? Would you become more motivated?” Millions of people are about to find out.
