You probably have a number of goals that you want to reach in the coming year, whether that's getting more exercise, reading more books or perhaps just spending more time with friends.
Well, Google Calendar has an excellent way to help you reach all of your goals, and so today I want to show you everything you need to know about setting and tracking your goals within Google Calendar.
Hello everyone, Scott Friesen at Simpletivity helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And let's start off with our mobile app because that's the only place you can go to start or create a goal.
But as I'm gonna show you, you can see and edit and even change your goals within the desktop app. So I'm gonna be switching back and forth as a part of today's video.
So to get started, all you need to do is hit the plus button in the bottom right-hand corner. Now, you're probably used to this, to creating a new event or maybe adding a reminder, but we want to select that little flag to create a new goal.
And right off the bat, Google has given us a number of suggestions including exercise, building a skill, spending time with family and friends, maybe just me time, or organizing your life.
Now, if none of these apply directly to you that's okay, you can choose a custom goal. But Google does a good thing to get us started at least in the right direction.
So I'm gonna start with exercise and you can see it's gonna ask me which exercise I'd like to set as my goal but I could select Custom down below. So you can choose absolutely anything that you want.
So in this example I'm gonna choose walking. I want to get out and enjoy a walk more often. So I'm gonna select Walk. The next option it gives me is how often, and again you can be very customized with this. You can choose more options here but it's giving me a number of things to consider.
I think five times a week would be great. So I'm going to select that option. Lastly, how long, how long of a walk would I like to go on. In this case let's say I'd like to aim for 30 minutes as a part of my walk.
Last question actually is the best time. Morning, afternoon, evening, or should I just try and fit it in whenever I can. Well, I'd like to do it in the afternoon so I'm gonna tell Google Afternoon.
So now I see a summary of my selections, five sessions a week of 30 minutes in the afternoons. Now, I could select more options at this point and if I do, you can see that I have a few more things I can change here.
By default, it's gonna give me a reminder 30 minutes before. I can delete that if I want to. I can also toggle on or off smart notifications so that's before and after my sessions to help me prepare but also track because of course tracking your progress is so important in reaching your goals.
And I can also change my default color. And I'm gonna do it right now. I'm gonna select Tomato, I'm gonna select that red just so it stands out more on my calendar. I'm gonna hit Save.
I'm returned to this screen here, and the very last thing that we need to do is hit that check mark here. When I hit that check mark it's gonna take a few seconds to find the best time for my goal and actually schedule those goals into my calendar.
So now it takes us back to our calendar and you can see it's already included a walk later today. At the bottom it tells me that the first time is today at 2 p.m. Does this time work for you?
Now, I could select Adjust time if I wanted to, and you can adjust any of the times. Not just the first time or the first schedule. But in this case that looks fine to me. So I'm gonna say Looks fine.
And if I scroll over here to the right, you can see that it's included a walk in the next few days so that I can achieve that five walks per week. But what I love about this is if I scroll here to Wednesday, you can see it's not 2 p.m.
It's actually worked around my existing schedule. Let's jump over to the desktop version so we can take a look at this a bit closer.
So here, in the desktop version, of course we're gonna see exactly what we saw in the mobile version. If I scroll over to the next week you can see I've got my walk scheduled in there as well.
But this is what I was talking about is that it's actually learning what I have booked already and it's going to schedule around that. So it could see that tomorrow I can't go for my walk at 2 p.m. so it's gonna have to adjust itself here.
But it gets better than that. Because let's say that something is scheduled for me. Let's say someone invites me to a meeting or maybe I need to take a meeting at a time where one of my goals is already scheduled.
So let's take a look at this Thursday, for example. And I'm gonna input a sample meeting. I'm just gonna say Sample meeting here and I'm gonna make it an hour, I'm gonna say from two to three.
So you can see before I hit Save it's gonna be in conflict with this goal. So let's find out what happens. I'm gonna hit Save here. And in just a moment, look at that! It automatically adjusted my goal.
It took that existing goal of walking at 2 p.m. and it bumped it up to 1 p.m. because it knew that there was a conflict now. Maybe there is something else I would like to do here.
Now, again, at any time I could say you know what, that's still not gonna work. I'd rather not walk immediately after my lunch here with Mike, I'd like to have it a little bit later in the day.
So I'm gonna click and drag it to 4 p.m. So you can edit your individual goals as well, right? And if I need to delete something, you know what, this one isn't going to work here, I can click on it and say, you know what, let's just get rid of that one.
I can't make it that day. I'm gonna delete it. So you can edit and change your goals here within the desktop version. You just can't add or start a new goal from the desktop version. You do need to do that from the mobile site.
One thing I want to show you here as well is that if you click on the goal, let's say for today, and let's say I've done it already, you're gonna see this little Did It option here.
So I'm gonna say yeah, I did this walk today, I wanna cross it off. So I'm gonna select Did it, it's gonna cross it off letting me know that I've accomplished that goal, and then I can keep on with my day.
So now back in the mobile view you can see that can still have that one crossed off. If I click on it, you can see that I can change it back. At the bottom I could say Mark as not done if I hit it by mistake.
But what I really wanna point out here is how goals within Google Calendar also tracks your progress. So here you can see that it says that I've done one out of five this week. And I've got this little circular graph that's going to let me know.
Now, if I scroll to the left something that is a little funny is that it's always gonna show you the last four weeks. And so even though I started this goal today, it's actually going all the way back to November 10th, which is a little odd since I didn't begin my goal back there, but I think just by default what it's going to do is always show you the goals of the last four weeks.
So you can track your progress here as well. But if I need to make adjustments to my goals, I can do that too. If I go up to the top and hit the Edit icon, I'm back into sort of a similar view here but this time I can actually click on five sessions a week.
I can say you know what, that was maybe a little too much, I'd like to change it to three sessions a week but I'd also like to change it to maybe one hour in length. So you don't have to start fresh every single time.
You don't have to delete something from the beginning. You can go in and make those adjustments along the way.
I'd love to hear from you next. Have you used Google Calendar goals? If so, what types of things have you used it for? And if not, I would encourage you to test it out.
No matter what your goals are, see how Google Calendar can help you reach them. Thank you so much for watching and I hope you subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
