Technology

The Calendar That Checks You

Google just bought a fascinating app that promises to change how we manage our time.

Google just bought a relatively obscure little iPhone app called Timeful that is a bigger deal than it seems.
More than a calendar or reminders app, Timeful carries the ambitious goal of using artificial intelligence to change the way we manage our time.

Photo illustration by Juliana Jiménez. Photo by Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images

On Monday, Google bought a little Mountain View, California, startup that makes a mobile app called Timeful. This is a bigger deal than it might seem.

In the galaxy of Google acquisitions—YouTube, Nest, DoubleClick—Timeful looks like a lesser light. It makes just one app, which is available on iOS only, and that app is nowhere to be found on the App Store leaderboard. At first glance, Timeful is an also-ran in the crowded field of productivity apps. Soon, it won’t even be that: Google will cease further development on the app and instead put the 20-person Timeful team to work on its own products, including Inbox and Google Calendar.

And yet the deal is significant, not because of the amount Google paid or the number of users involved—details weren’t disclosed, but it’s safe to assume neither is particularly large by Silicon Valley standards—but because of what Timeful is and the promise it represents. More than a calendar or reminders app, it carries the ambitious goal of using artificial intelligence to change the way we manage our time. And now its wildly talented creators—who include a Stanford University artificial intelligence expert, his Ph.D. student, and a famous behavioral economist—will try to help Google do just that.

In a few years, we might look back on Google’s acquisition of Timeful as a milestone in the company’s progress toward one of its great long-term goals: building an artificially intelligent personal assistant.

“This is not an acqui-hire,” said Timeful chairman and Stanford computer science professor Yoav Shoham, who spoke first with Slate about the deal. “This is a strategic investment on the part of Google for something that they and we hope will materially impact their products.” To convince Timeful to sell, Shoham told me, Google wooed the startup’s leaders with a presentation on how the company imagined integrating Timeful’s technology into its own apps. “We were quite blown away,” he said, “by what we viewed as their deep insight into what we were doing here.”

So what is Timeful? On an abstract level, it’s a vision of how 21st-century technology could be used to guide our decisions about what to do at any given moment. More concretely, it’s a sort of intelligent calendar app that learns your habits and tries to help you find the time to achieve your goals and to-dos. It aspires to do for each user what a first-rate executive assistant would do for a CEO—anticipate needs, prioritize objectives, optimize your time.

Timeful is the rare mobile app that grew out of an academic philosophy paper—a 2009 paper by Shoham titled “Logical Theories of Intention and the Database Perspective.” Shoham and his collaborators—computer science doctoral student Jacob Bank and behavioral economist and best-selling author Dan Ariely—set out to create a tool to help people realize the sorts of intentions that don’t easily fit into a traditional calendar or to-do list: things like “work on my novel,” “call Mom once a week,” or “do laundry sometime this evening.” 

To that end, Timeful doesn’t just keep track of appointments and to-dos, but also habits you want to cultivate, leisure activities you want to find time for, and those long-term projects you keep putting off. Its algorithms seek not just to keep a record of your schedule but also to understand it—and to use that understanding to help you accomplish things you otherwise wouldn’t. It does this in much the same way a human assistant would: by carefully observing your patterns of activity and making timely recommendations based on its understanding of you.

Timeful starts by ingesting your calendar and prompting you to create some to-dos. From there, it veers into more personal territory. To Timeful’s creators, calendars are good for keeping track of very specific, time-anchored events, especially meetings. To-do lists are good for, well, not much, other than making you feel good about committing a lot of to-dos to paper. Timeful bridges the two by filling the gaps in your calendar with recommendations for other activities you might want to take on in the meantime. And, unlike most reminder apps, it doesn’t let you forget a to-do: It will keep bugging you until you either cross it off your list or tell it to shut up and forget about it.

For instance, if you tell Timeful you’d like to call your mom once a week, it might first send you a notification on a Sunday afternoon, asking, “Is now a good time to call your mom?” If you tell it “no,” it will remember that, and it will try to find a more opportune time later on. Eventually it might notice that you’re most likely to say “yes” to calling your mom when it suggests it on a Tuesday or Thursday afternoon that happens to be light on other appointments. On Sunday afternoons, it will learn, you tend to prefer going to the gym or relaxing with friends.

As you might expect, the app in its present (and now final) form is far from perfect.  I downloaded it last year after a meeting with Shoham, Bank, and Ariely, who explained its purpose so eloquently that I couldn’t wait to get started. Unfortunately, I had to, as I had several more obligations immediately after that meeting, and by the time I finished those, I just wanted to relax. It soon became ironically evident that the biggest barrier to using this miraculous time-management app was finding the time to start using it.

Machine-learning algorithms are only as good as the data they’re given, and I never took the time to let Timeful get to know me. Even so, it helped me accomplish several tasks that had languished on other to-do lists for months, simply by pestering me gently but persistently until I addressed them.

Shoham told me he’s immensely proud of the app and the team that created it, but he admitted it was far from a finished product. “We viewed what we did at Timeful as, I wouldn’t say ‘proof of concept,’ but as a very early stage compared to what the potential is,’ ” he said.

That Google’s higher-ups quickly grasped that potential isn’t surprising. Google itself has long harbored similar ambitions to harness artificial intelligence for productivity applications. Its own Google Now product draws on information from your emails, calendar, and Web searches to notify you when it’s time to leave for the airport, or when your favorite basketball team is about to play a televised game. Its fancy new mobile email app, Inbox, takes it upon itself to organize your inbox by integrating reminders and grouping incoming messages into “bundles” based on your preferences.

Neither Shoham nor Google would tell me exactly how Timeful’s features might be used to augment those sorts of services. But it’s easy to imagine Google Calendar hazarding suggestions for how to use your leisure time, or Inbox tucking a reminder to update your résumé in between your daily newsletters and your Amazon order confirmations. Combine those with Google Now, and you start to move toward that ideal of your mobile device as an artificially intelligent personal assistant. It’s the same goal Google had in mind when it hired the controversial A.I. legend Ray Kurzweil a couple of years ago.

The idea of delegating the executive function of your brain to an intelligent mobile app is very Kurzweilian, and it isn’t one that everyone is likely to embrace. Shoham told me Timeful never regarded standard calendar or to-do apps as its most formidable rivals. Rather, “our biggest competition was people not using any app, but just keeping things in their head or maybe writing them down on a piece of paper.” In other words, Timeful was battling for market share with the unaided executive function of the human brain. (One could say much the same about Evernote.) In my case, it lost, but that might change once its features begin to crop up in the Google apps I already use daily. I don’t need to remind myself to check Inbox or my Google Calendar. If anything, I’d like to see the Timeful team find a way to remind me to stop checking it so often.