The Power of Deliberate Practice — New feature in v2.6

To achieve your goals, you need to commit quality time. There isn’t much debate about that. But did you know that the quantity of your commitment is just as important as the quality? Malcolm Gladwell, pop psych writer, believes that 10,000 hours of practice are needed to become world-class in any field. Scientific research also shows that expert-level performance is the result of expert-level practice, not due to innate talent.

So, if you have a specific goal of improving performance, planning a structured, and regular activity is the key to success. However, with such a busy life, and so many unavoidable interruptions, it is easy to fall off the wagon when you plan a regular practice. Planning a gym routine on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, as an example, is prone to failure. But, if you plan it, say, 3 times a week with some flexibility on the days, it’s much more likely to succeed.

In April 2016, Google introduced Google Goals, a flexible yet structured way to schedule time for your goals. “Goals are hard work. Whether you want to read more books, learn a new language or work out regularly, it’s getting harder and harder to find the time even when your goal really matters to you. So today we’re introducing Goals in Google Calendar. You add a personal goal — like “run 3 times a week” — and Calendar will schedule time automatically and then help you actually stick to it.”, explains Google.

This flexible and automatic scheduling is so much in tune what SkedPal’s philosophy. And, it had to be added to its features. With version 2.6, SkedPal now supports goals. Now, you can set a task to repeat 3 times a week, as an example, without the need to specify which days. This flexible repeat functionality combined with Time Maps make an incredibly powerful tool to achieve your goals. While Google Goals is great for limited number of personal goals, SkedPal gives you the following advantages:

• SkedPal is aware of everything else you need to get done. So, it gives you a realistic schedule. By using the time blocking methodology, it won’t let you bite more than you can chew. Having too many goals is a sign of getting nowhere.
• Time Maps define your desired personalized best times to schedule time for your practice.
• Buffers make it more practical to deal with the nuances as your days unfold.