Follow Through on Your New Year’s Resolution with the ‘Productive’ app
The urge to turn our life around often strikes at the beginning of a new year. Why? Well, it’s just a good time for setting our goals and plans in motion for the following months. By changing our daily actions, we hope to achieve a personal success. This is what a New Year’s resolution is about. A resolution usually entails either successfully starting good habits, or getting rid of bad ones. Some aim to exercise more, learn new skills, or be frugal and save up more money. Others might try to quit smoking, spend more time with friends and family, or read more books.
But what mostly happens is, after a few weeks, we lose sight of our goals. Sometimes we keep our promises, and more times we don’t. In the end, we couldn’t force ourselves to change and stick to the New Year’s resolution. There are a bunch of explanations for this. For one, we might have set the sights too high. Maybe the goals were too vague with no tangible milestones. Or we might lack the motivation to return to our path to success. But remember this: a habit is formed by doing something repeatedly and consistently until it comes naturally to you. Choosing the right tools for the task goes a long way in saving your mental energy. Honestly, you’ll be surprised.
Productive - Habit Tracker is an application that can help you follow through on your New Year’s resolution. It works by tracking and rewarding habits you want to keep as a part of your daily routine. It also organizes your life by setting a to-do list for each day, and shows your progress with clear visuals. There’s an array of similar apps to choose from, depending on your personal preferences, such as HabitBull, StickK, Streaks, Way of Life, Habitify, or Strides. The differences are in their designs and minor details in their use. Still, here are three reasons we choose Productive - Habit Tracker over other apps as our helper for the year to come.
Stylish and User-friendly Design
More often than not, one of the reasons why we quit using some apps is its dull and unintuitive design. Productive is the opposite of that. With a black-grey background, white text, cute & colorful icons, and no clutter of on-screen graphics, the app’s menu is simple and easy to read.
To use the app, you must first set your resolutions. You can either write your own, or choose from preset categories of popular resolutions. For example, health: drink more water, drink less alcohol or coffee, eat more fruits and vegetables. Social: spend more time with family, spend less time on social media, do volunteer work. Or efficiency: read more books, stick to a sleep schedule, learn new skills, and many more.
You can set details for each resolution such as the frequency of the desired behavior; do you want to repeat it daily, weekly, or monthly? You can also specify at which point of the day do you want to do it, which days in the week, or which part of the month.
After setting up, you only need to open the app and confirm if you’ve completed your daily tasks. Swiping right would mark the task as “Done”, while swiping left would mark a “Skip”. The icon and the white text on the task will turn gray after you’ve marked it.
Keeping Your Spirit with Reminders
For each resolution, you can tell the app to remind you at different times to complete the to-do list, with five alarm tones to choose from. A resolution can be set to send out up to seven reminders per day. So rest assured, you won’t forget to do the thing!
When you open the application, a window will pop up, detailing your tasks for the day. In the sample image here, the morning task is to wake up at 7am. For the evening, call mum or dad, then it’s badminton time. (These orders can be changed.) Finally, don’t forget to read a book, at any time of the day. If there’s no current task, the app will cheer you on with a text such as “You have nothing due this afternoon. Time to relax!”
Simple Statistics Report
You can see the progress towards your resolutions in the Life Log page; it shows the results of all resolutions, or each one separately, on a monthly calendar with a line of green dots. Solid dots mean all daily tasks were completed, while outlined dots mean some tasks were skipped. What would encourage you to follow your goals is a thin straight line that links all solid dots together. Call this a “chain of success”, if you will. Whenever you forget your tasks, the line linking your efforts will be broken. This visual representation will give you the incentive to get back on that chain of success once again.
Productive - Habit Tracker is supported on iOS with 18 languages available including Thai, making it all the more convenient. Another perk is that the application is free to use. Free users can set up to five resolutions. But if you feel that’s way too little, you can upgrade to a premium account, and pay a monthly, quarterly, or yearly fee, starting at 99 THB per month. Premium users can set an unlimited number of resolutions and receive notifications based on their locations. They’ll also get detailed statistics for each resolution, insights on habit trends updated weekly, and can also set a passcode on the app for added privacy.
For those of you who’ve always made New Year’s resolutions, but haven’t been successful in convincing yourself to stick to new habits, 2019 is a great opportunity to start over. We guarantee that life gets easier with the right helpers. (And no slacking off, of course!) Build your chain of success by start using this habit tracker app, and make this Year of the Pig the first year you complete ALL of you New Year’s resolutions!
