In the third week of Habits Month, it's time to look at a digital approach to help us establish habits. After covering routine triggers and paper reminders over the last two weeks, we now get to explore habit apps!
Habits Week 3: Habit Apps
If you regularly use a smartphone or tablet, you can use an app to remind yourself to accomplish something important regularly. Such apps provide reminders for any new behavior you can think of and a way to track your progress and help maintain a consistent pattern of success. Many also use some form of gamification to turn the experience into something fun or even competitive if you involve some friends.
The basic idea is to define something you want to do regularly, like "Sort 10 photos," then define how frequently you want to do it, like once per day, three times a week, and so on. Then, you mark off in the app each time you do that activity.
Of course, this alone is relatively simple and boring. However, these apps also provide reminder notifications and usually have some "streak tracking" features to help you stay motivated. Some apps incorporate sharing habits with friends for accountability. Beeminder actually makes you pay real money each time you miss a regular goal. Yikes.
Since gamified activity streaks have been around for a long time, this feature might not be as motivating today as it was years ago. Failing even once can be pretty demoralizing after you've maintained a streak for a long time. Recently, I discovered an app that takes a different approach: Polar Habits. It tracks your success as a trend, not an all-or-nothing chain where you're back to zero after one mistake. They have both a free option and a free trial of their paid option, so check it out if that approach sounds interesting.
If not, look over this list of over a dozen habit-building apps and see if any look like a good fit. I've used four of them personally, plus a couple of others not on the list. They are all similarly functional and capable, though each has particular features and strengths.
A critical caveat to habit-building apps: if you already feel like you get too many vibrations, dings, or beeps from your smartphone, throwing another one into the mix won't do you any favors—and certainly won't give you success with better organizational habits. First, take some time to tame your notifications so they can provide real value again. Only add something new once you're confident in the attention you can provide.
Next week, we'll look at a final (and incredibly effective) method for building habits: accountability. Until then, happy data-taming!