Today, there’s an app for pretty much everything, ranging from great guided meditation apps to apps that link to your smart devices so that your new space-age washing machine can send you live updates when your laundry is done.
At their best, apps can have the potential to significantly improve our lives in a number of different ways. They help us stay on top of our tasks and obligations, stay motivated on a day-to-day basis, manage important documents, and more.
Here are 3 kinds of apps that you should be using every day in order to improve your overall quality of life, boost your energy levels, help you reduce stress, and put you in a situation where you can more easily get the most out of each day.
A good and adaptive budgeting app
Managing personal finances is often a tricky thing — and many people out there handle their finances more or less on the fly, without having anything like a comprehensive household budget, and without necessarily having a great sense of awareness of where all of their money is being spent.
Today, there are easily accessible online services that can allow you to compare credit and investigate your finances more broadly, and there are also some great budgeting apps.
Likely the most popular budgeting app and service out there today is one called “You Need a Budget,” or “YNAB” for short. YNAB works by helping you to budget your income as and when you receive it, an “envelope” budgeting system, and a “zero-based” approach.
The upshot is that you only have to worry about assigning the money you have at any given time to your budget categories, and it’s easy to move money between categories on the fly in order to “roll with the punches.”
Using a good and adaptive budgeting app such as this one can reduce a lot of the frustration and complexity that’s traditionally been associated with budgeting.
A habit tracker app that you find motivating
As the habit expert James Clear doesn’t shy away from pointing out in his highly popular book “Atomic Habits,” the habits that we repeat each day can have an enormous impact on the kinds of lives we lead, as well as dramatically influencing our ability to put our best foot forward each day.
The issue is that establishing new habits, and getting rid of old ones, can be difficult — not least of all because habits are things we do more or less automatically, in many cases.
Fortunately, there are many great habit tracker apps today that can help to gently remind and encourage you to stick to your ideal habit routines of choice.
You shouldn’t definitely try using a habit tracker — and you should focus on finding one that you find pleasant and motivating to use.
A calendar app that syncs across devices
No matter who you are, where you are, and what you do, you’ll almost certainly have a variety of obligations, meetings, and appointments to attend to on a regular basis.
Using a good calendar app that syncs seamlessly between your devices can help you to stay on top of things in a low-stress way, and reminders can keep you from missing important events.
What apps are your absolute must-haves?
Thank you for reading!