App Roundup – 4 Life Changers

My app collection seems to go in phases. When I discover one great one an entire wave of them come into my existence. These are life changers, productivity changers and I included links here for you to check out.

Alarmy – Getting up early to make time for self-care and daily steps towards your goals opens up a world of possibility. If you feel at the mercy of your snooze button this app will change all that. I use the function where snooze is not an option and the app forces me to take a picture to match a picture I took the night before. I use my bathroom sink as the picture so I am on my feet up and focused before the blaring, super loud alarm will quiet. I have not overslept once with this alarm.

Moment – Their motto is ‘put down your phone and get back to your life.’ Love it! Be prepared to be shocked and appalled. This app shows you how many hours you spend on your phone, what apps you use and how many times a day you pick it up. This is all in an effort to decrease phone time. You can’t improve what you don’t track. You can also set it up for family tracking.

Focus – (Just Drive) – This app will yell at you (literally!) if you touch your phone while driving. Great to train yourself to stop the habit of just even glancing at it for a second. Fortunately, you still can set up a driving direction or start a podcast before you start driving. But touch your phone while driving and it will yell at you loudly. It senses if you are driving so if you are a passenger you can shake it to indicate you are not driving. So yes, you could fool it even if you were driving, but the whole point is it is a tool to help you reach the goal of phone free driving.

Evernote – Evernote has been around a while. And I will be the first to admit it can seem less than intuitive for how to use it in your life, but on my second try using this app I fell in love.  So, even if you downloaded it and gave up, give it one more go. I describe it like Pinterest for the entire world, not just the web. It works well for people that are working on multiple projects at one time and the main goal is idea capture. How many great ideas do you have that just flitter away because you didn’t capture them? Say I am driving and I have an idea for part of a book. When I get to work I just click on that book folder and add an audio note describing what I want to remember. Say you are shopping and see something you want to buy, but not now. Take a picture and drop it into the folder for House Ideas. If you are on the web and see a website you want to come back to instead of just bookmarking it in your browser you can drop it into the folder project related to that. So if I am planning a Women’s Retreat and see a site I drop it specifically into that folder. You can have it on your PC and phone and it syncs.

What apps do you use daily and feel are life-changing?