Presumably if you've made it here, you're coming from my Facebook post by the same name. This is intended to be a more detailed round-up, featuring in-depth tips about how I use these apps and how I've benefited from them. At the end of each entry is a link to the easiest way to find the app. I use the term "app" loosely but it's the easiest catch-all term. They're ordered roughly based on how great of an impact they've had on my life according to two metrics: Increased productivity, and increased ability to achieve life goals.
I wish all of these apps were free, and the price tag for a couple of them probably isn't worth it to some people. But I can confidently say that I would pay much more than the few dollars cost for these apps. It's up to you to decide if the benefits seem worth the cost. On the upside, they all have free trials, so go ahead and try them out for one month and see if they're worth the cost of a coffee and donut!
That being said, let's get into the details.
1) 750 Words. This has to go at the top of the list. The amount of mental clarity I get from doing 750 Words is unparalleled. 750 Words is a clean and straightforward website where you simply go write on a blank page every day. It's based on the idea of "morning pages", where you write three pages in the morning to clear your head -- 750 words is roughly 3 pages.
You don't have to write 750 words every day. The idea is that you write something, just to get your thoughts out concretely. The website urges you on with a bowling-based scoring system that awards points and badges the longer you stay on a writing streak, giving some incentive to get on and pound out a few rambling thoughts even on days when you aren't feeling it.
I tend to spend most of my days on 750 Words journaling. I hash out the things I've been thinking about, clarify my sources of anxiety, and set goals that I want to achieve. Anxious thoughts are so much worse when they're undefined, and 750 Words allows me to define most of the things that are troubling me and plan for the future. When I'm not journaling, I write blog posts or short stories.
I didn't realize how much I was benefiting from 750 Words until I stopped for roughly two years. I've just picked it back up for the last 20 days and the amount of clarity and focus I've found since then makes recent history seem like a muddled cloud. It helps me to think more intentionally, plan my life more effectively and wrestle with issues that I usually wouldn't even think about.
$5/month. Worth at least $30/month to me. "Why not save the cash and just go journal in a Word document?" I don't know. I tried that but it's not the same. Your first month's a free trial. Give it a whirl and see what I mean. www.750words.com
2) PrayerMate. I have never felt so compelled and enabled to pray in my entire life as I have with this app. That sounds like strong hyperbole, but it's the literal truth.
This app works similarly to the index-card based prayer system suggested by Paul Miller in A Praying Life. You start by creating categories. Example categories from my PrayerMate are "World Missions" "Jenna and I" "Friends and Family" "Missionaries". Within each category you have a set of subjects. You can either create these yourself, download them through the app, or follow a feed through the app.
If you create the subject yourself, you give it a name and a description (and a photo if you want). The description can be either some background information or a specific prayer you want to pray. If you download the subjects through the app, you can get packs of prayers like "Prayers for my wife" "Prayers for my pastor" etc. If you follow a feed, you get new prayer requests every day. I follow the "Operation World" feed and it has a different country to pray for every day, along with some background information and prayer requests from that country.
The beauty of the app is that you can have tons of subjects in each category but choose to only see one or two subjects from each category every day. This means that although I might have ten prayers under "Jenna and I", eight "Missionaries" to pray for, and dozens of other subjects on the side, I only ever have ten subjects to pray for each day. That's a very manageable chunk for one day, and over time the app makes sure that I get through all of the prayer requests I have.
Prayer no longer feels so overwhelming. It takes about 10 minutes to go through the list each day if I don't have more time. When I tell someone I'll pray for them, I put their request in the app so I don't forget. Furthermore, the app offers the feature to archive old prayers that are no longer necessary. I'm looking forward to being able to go through the archive to revisit answered prayers in the future.
This one's free. If you have a smart device, you've gotta try PrayerMate out. www.geero.net/prayermate
3) YNAB. You Need A Budget. Holy cow, who knew budgeting could be so easy? I used to use Excel and meticulously copy down transactions from bank statements, trying to organize rows and formulas with some sense of clarity and often feeling buried. My friend Mitch recommended a simpler solution. YNAB makes everything so easy -- it's all laid out in front of you. You can track down monthly expenses, future savings, rainy day funds, bills. It's all right there and it's sensibly put together.
The budgeting workhorse is on your computer, but there's an included app so you can track your expenses on the go. It syncs through Dropbox, so you log onto your computer later and can see what you've been spending your dough on. Once you get into the swing of a couple months, it's easy to see where your money's going and to plan for future expenses. YNAB has really helped me take control of my money in a way I never had before.
The developer of YNAB is also a huge advocate for sensible budgeting and spending and he really wants to help people use YNAB well, so he has a whole email and video series about how to use YNAB. It's thoughtfully put together and easy to understand, so if you start using YNAB you can figure out how to maximize it too. You can try YNAB free for 34 days. If you're a student, it stays free while you're in school. If you're not a student, it's a one-time fee of $60. We're still using it under the student license, but I won't hesitate to buy it once we're out of school. It saves countless hours of poring over numbers. www.ynab.com
4) Nanny for Google Chrome. Okay, the name sounds a little patronizing. But rest assured, this program is awesome. It's an add-on for Google Chrome (you can find similar add-ons for other browsers) that regulates your internet usage. So if you're spending too much time on Facebook or YouTube or BuzzFeed, you can allot yourself a certain amount of time and when your time is up, those sites will be blocked.
There are many variants on the market, but what sets Nanny apart is the ability to create "Blocksets". This means that you don't have to just give yourself 15 minutes for all time wasting websites and throw up your hands when you accidentally watched a long YouTube video and used all your time up. You can give yourself 5 minutes for YouTube, 5 minutes for Facebook, 0 minutes for BuzzFeed, etc.
You can also change the time frame for your allotted time -- so it doesn't just need to be 5 minutes every day. It can be 5 minutes every hour or 5 minutes every 6 hours. That way if it's something you need to see throughout your day, like email, you could give yourself little chunks of time throughout the day.
I'm not gonna lie, the interface is clunky. It's hard to get it working right, and it doesn't always work perfectly. The other downside is that you can simply go into your Add-On management and disable Nanny in about four seconds. This means that Nanny isn't the ultimate solution to internet time-wasting. But in conjunction with accountability, for example having your spouse ask you if you disabled the blocker each day, Nanny can be really effective.
It's hard to block all your internet time-sinks and I still waste a lot of time prowling the internet even with Nanny, but there are sites that are guaranteed time wasters that I can't access anymore. I would say Nanny probably saves me an average of 25 minutes of my life per day. That sure adds up! (Find it on the Chrome Web Store)
5) Circa. This is the best way I've found to get through the news. I like to stay informed on what the big developments in the world are, but oftentimes when I go through traditional news sites the articles are either prohibitively long or they require background knowledge that I don't have because I don't stay up to date on the news.
Circa comes through on both counts. The news stories are always extremely brief, cropped and curated by Circa's editors, and they focus on the big picture in every story. You get paragraph breakdowns of what a story means with the option to dig in deeper if you'd like.
If I want to just skim the big developments in the world, I can go through the 10 biggest stories Circa has selected for the day, reading paragraph summaries of each, and spend about 5 minutes getting acquainted with world developments. If I have more time, I can go through the entire day's news (usually about 40 stories per day), skimming headlines where I'm not interested, and feel reasonably well informed in about 15-20 minutes.
The interface is clean, sensible and smooth. Not available for computer yet, but it looks great on Android. www.cir.ca
6) Sleep as Android. This app is a sleep-tracker and smart alarm. I'm not sold on the sleep tracking component -- you turn the phone on airplane mode and put it under your pillow and based on the amount of moving you do, it analyzes how well you slept. It doesn't usually seem to correspond very well to how refreshed I feel in the morning, so I've mostly given up on the sleep assessment.
However, what is useful about the app is the smart alarm. Within 30 minutes of your designated alarm time, the app will detect if you're moving, indicating that you're in light sleep, and will quietly chirp to wake you up. No more blaring alarms in the morning, no more waking up anyone else sleeping in the same room.
I used to get yanked out of bed, groggy and bleary, to a squawking alarm clock. Now it's a subtle little melody under my pillow that wakes me up before Jenna can even hear it. It doesn't wake me up perfectly refreshed and ready to go every morning, but the wake-up experience is a lot less painful. As a bonus, it keeps track of the hours I've slept each night so I can identify when I need to catch up on sleep. Free trial, $4.50 for the full version. (Android only. Find it on Google Play)
7) Accountable2You. The fundamental premise of an accountability program is that you have your internet activity monitored in reports that are sent to accountability partners to keep you on the straight and narrow. I've tried competitors Covenant Eyes and X3Watch in the past, and neither compare to Accountable2You. Covenant Eyes is more expensive and consistently slowed down my internet browsing speed. X3Watch is roughly the same price for the Premium version, which admittedly I never tried -- but the Free version, which promised many of the same features as the Premium version, was frustratingly glitchy and inconsistent. The interface was poorly designed and reports seemed to show up at random.
Accountable2You, recommended by my friend Kevin, is well designed, $5/month for unlimited users, devices and accountability partners, and it's working great. It doesn't slow my internet down and the reports show up on time as promised. It works on computers and smart devices so everything can be secured. This is what I've wanted for a while. If you feel like you need accountability software but haven't settled on an option, today's the day. Get Accountable2You. If $5/month seems steep, find some like-minded people and split the cost. Unlimited devices, unlimited users! www.accountable2you.com
8) Podcast Addict. Podcasts are nothing new but I didn't realize you could get them on Android. If I wanted to listen to podcasts in the past, I would have to carry around my old iPod and that was too many items for my pockets. Now the podcasts are on my phone, so I can tune in on my work commute or when I'm hanging around the apartment.
Podcasts fill the other half of my intellectual desires. I want to stay informed with the news and I want to keep learning new things. Circa takes care of the news. Podcasts take care of the learning. Admittedly, I've yet to find podcasts that are more learning and less talk show -- Freakonomics and How Stuff Works have rave reviews but spent a higher fraction of the time chatting than I'd prefer.
However, the gold I've found is sermons. Many churches put out sermons via podcasts, and downloading them this way puts them in a format that's easier for me to keep around and access than downloading mp3s from websites. I highly recommend the podcast Radical Together by David Platt. (Android only. Find it on Google Play)
9) YouVersion. This is the Bible app that everyone uses for those times you forget your Bible, but it has a feature I never took advantage of before -- Bible reading plans.
In the first place, this isn't a technical item, but I think everyone should have some kind of Bible reading plan. I never really have. I'd read this and that when I had the time. Now I'm doing a chronological plan so I don't have to plan anything new for the next 340 days. I just keep following the plan. Wow! If you do your plan through YouVersion then 1) it's always on your phone and 2) you get affirming checkmarks all over the place. (Find it on Google Play)
10) Google Tasks. This is the little list-keeping window in Gmail that you can bring up by clicking Tasks in the dropdown menu in the upper left-hand corner. It's a simple, no-frills task list. It's not shareable like Out of Milk (see below) but the interface is cleaner. I was tethered to my computer until I found out that there was an app to connect the list from Gmail to your phone. Unfortunately, the free version has ads and the full version is $1, but that's not much if you need to stay on top of your tasks.
Using Google Tasks is another way I take control of my life. 750 Words helps me figure goals out and Google Tasks helps me keep them in sight. I break my tasks down into Future Tasks, Current Tasks and then tasks oriented around specific goals, like Medical School or Tax Season. Having my tasks in front of me makes it easier to perceive progress when I need to slog through a mess of emails or forms or activities. And if something comes up that I don't have time to deal with, I can throw it on the task list and forget about it for the moment. (Find it on Google Play)
11) LastPass. This doesn't do anything to dramatically improve my life, but it's a constant source of convenience and it took about 6 minutes to set up, so any benefit is gravy, really. It's another browser add-on, available for all major browsers. It saves your username and passwords and then automatically inputs them when you visit those websites. You access LastPass using a master password (which you need to remember).
"Okay, but why not just save my password in the browser?" It's a lot less secure. More hackable -- Chrome for instance isn't protected by a master password.
"Okay, but I just use 'steve1234' on all websites so I remember it." No! -- you should have different passwords for different websites.. though I'm speaking as someone who didn't follow this advice until a few months ago. LastPass generates randomized passwords and then remembers them for you, so you can have 16-character super-secure passwords for all the websites you use and you don't have to remember what they are. Nice. All you have to remember is the master password.
It doesn't take much effort to install LastPass and upgrade the level of security you have on your devices. And it's free! www.lastpass.com
12) Out Of Milk. This is probably the simplest out of my app suggestions. It's a little collaborative list-maker. It's free and you can sync between multiple accounts, so Jenna and I share several lists. Nothing life-changing here, but it makes it easier to keep track of shopping lists and to-dos that we're both involved in. (Find it on Google Play)
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Hopefully one or more of these apps piqued your interest. Most of them are free. Most of them are super easy to get started with. I'm sure almost all of them could offer benefits to your life, however small.
If nothing else, I urge you to try 750 Words. If you've never had the experience of laying your thoughts out concretely for several days in a row, you have to try it. For me and a couple others I know that have given it a shot, it opens up a mental clarity that is hard to achieve elsewhere. It's not just the journaling, but it's the consistent journaling and self-probing. Go to 750words.com, sign up for the free trial and just try a week of journaling 750 words a day.
I'm not getting paid by 750 Words or anything. I've just found the benefits of intentional self-awareness to be far greater than the $5/month cost. And I hope you will too.
I wish all of these apps were free, and the price tag for a couple of them probably isn't worth it to some people. But I can confidently say that I would pay much more than the few dollars cost for these apps. It's up to you to decide if the benefits seem worth the cost. On the upside, they all have free trials, so go ahead and try them out for one month and see if they're worth the cost of a coffee and donut!
That being said, let's get into the details.
1) 750 Words. This has to go at the top of the list. The amount of mental clarity I get from doing 750 Words is unparalleled. 750 Words is a clean and straightforward website where you simply go write on a blank page every day. It's based on the idea of "morning pages", where you write three pages in the morning to clear your head -- 750 words is roughly 3 pages.
You don't have to write 750 words every day. The idea is that you write something, just to get your thoughts out concretely. The website urges you on with a bowling-based scoring system that awards points and badges the longer you stay on a writing streak, giving some incentive to get on and pound out a few rambling thoughts even on days when you aren't feeling it.
I tend to spend most of my days on 750 Words journaling. I hash out the things I've been thinking about, clarify my sources of anxiety, and set goals that I want to achieve. Anxious thoughts are so much worse when they're undefined, and 750 Words allows me to define most of the things that are troubling me and plan for the future. When I'm not journaling, I write blog posts or short stories.
I didn't realize how much I was benefiting from 750 Words until I stopped for roughly two years. I've just picked it back up for the last 20 days and the amount of clarity and focus I've found since then makes recent history seem like a muddled cloud. It helps me to think more intentionally, plan my life more effectively and wrestle with issues that I usually wouldn't even think about.
$5/month. Worth at least $30/month to me. "Why not save the cash and just go journal in a Word document?" I don't know. I tried that but it's not the same. Your first month's a free trial. Give it a whirl and see what I mean. www.750words.com
2) PrayerMate. I have never felt so compelled and enabled to pray in my entire life as I have with this app. That sounds like strong hyperbole, but it's the literal truth.
This app works similarly to the index-card based prayer system suggested by Paul Miller in A Praying Life. You start by creating categories. Example categories from my PrayerMate are "World Missions" "Jenna and I" "Friends and Family" "Missionaries". Within each category you have a set of subjects. You can either create these yourself, download them through the app, or follow a feed through the app.
If you create the subject yourself, you give it a name and a description (and a photo if you want). The description can be either some background information or a specific prayer you want to pray. If you download the subjects through the app, you can get packs of prayers like "Prayers for my wife" "Prayers for my pastor" etc. If you follow a feed, you get new prayer requests every day. I follow the "Operation World" feed and it has a different country to pray for every day, along with some background information and prayer requests from that country.
The beauty of the app is that you can have tons of subjects in each category but choose to only see one or two subjects from each category every day. This means that although I might have ten prayers under "Jenna and I", eight "Missionaries" to pray for, and dozens of other subjects on the side, I only ever have ten subjects to pray for each day. That's a very manageable chunk for one day, and over time the app makes sure that I get through all of the prayer requests I have.
Prayer no longer feels so overwhelming. It takes about 10 minutes to go through the list each day if I don't have more time. When I tell someone I'll pray for them, I put their request in the app so I don't forget. Furthermore, the app offers the feature to archive old prayers that are no longer necessary. I'm looking forward to being able to go through the archive to revisit answered prayers in the future.
This one's free. If you have a smart device, you've gotta try PrayerMate out. www.geero.net/prayermate
3) YNAB. You Need A Budget. Holy cow, who knew budgeting could be so easy? I used to use Excel and meticulously copy down transactions from bank statements, trying to organize rows and formulas with some sense of clarity and often feeling buried. My friend Mitch recommended a simpler solution. YNAB makes everything so easy -- it's all laid out in front of you. You can track down monthly expenses, future savings, rainy day funds, bills. It's all right there and it's sensibly put together.
The budgeting workhorse is on your computer, but there's an included app so you can track your expenses on the go. It syncs through Dropbox, so you log onto your computer later and can see what you've been spending your dough on. Once you get into the swing of a couple months, it's easy to see where your money's going and to plan for future expenses. YNAB has really helped me take control of my money in a way I never had before.
The developer of YNAB is also a huge advocate for sensible budgeting and spending and he really wants to help people use YNAB well, so he has a whole email and video series about how to use YNAB. It's thoughtfully put together and easy to understand, so if you start using YNAB you can figure out how to maximize it too. You can try YNAB free for 34 days. If you're a student, it stays free while you're in school. If you're not a student, it's a one-time fee of $60. We're still using it under the student license, but I won't hesitate to buy it once we're out of school. It saves countless hours of poring over numbers. www.ynab.com
4) Nanny for Google Chrome. Okay, the name sounds a little patronizing. But rest assured, this program is awesome. It's an add-on for Google Chrome (you can find similar add-ons for other browsers) that regulates your internet usage. So if you're spending too much time on Facebook or YouTube or BuzzFeed, you can allot yourself a certain amount of time and when your time is up, those sites will be blocked.
There are many variants on the market, but what sets Nanny apart is the ability to create "Blocksets". This means that you don't have to just give yourself 15 minutes for all time wasting websites and throw up your hands when you accidentally watched a long YouTube video and used all your time up. You can give yourself 5 minutes for YouTube, 5 minutes for Facebook, 0 minutes for BuzzFeed, etc.
You can also change the time frame for your allotted time -- so it doesn't just need to be 5 minutes every day. It can be 5 minutes every hour or 5 minutes every 6 hours. That way if it's something you need to see throughout your day, like email, you could give yourself little chunks of time throughout the day.
I'm not gonna lie, the interface is clunky. It's hard to get it working right, and it doesn't always work perfectly. The other downside is that you can simply go into your Add-On management and disable Nanny in about four seconds. This means that Nanny isn't the ultimate solution to internet time-wasting. But in conjunction with accountability, for example having your spouse ask you if you disabled the blocker each day, Nanny can be really effective.
It's hard to block all your internet time-sinks and I still waste a lot of time prowling the internet even with Nanny, but there are sites that are guaranteed time wasters that I can't access anymore. I would say Nanny probably saves me an average of 25 minutes of my life per day. That sure adds up! (Find it on the Chrome Web Store)
5) Circa. This is the best way I've found to get through the news. I like to stay informed on what the big developments in the world are, but oftentimes when I go through traditional news sites the articles are either prohibitively long or they require background knowledge that I don't have because I don't stay up to date on the news.
Circa comes through on both counts. The news stories are always extremely brief, cropped and curated by Circa's editors, and they focus on the big picture in every story. You get paragraph breakdowns of what a story means with the option to dig in deeper if you'd like.
If I want to just skim the big developments in the world, I can go through the 10 biggest stories Circa has selected for the day, reading paragraph summaries of each, and spend about 5 minutes getting acquainted with world developments. If I have more time, I can go through the entire day's news (usually about 40 stories per day), skimming headlines where I'm not interested, and feel reasonably well informed in about 15-20 minutes.
The interface is clean, sensible and smooth. Not available for computer yet, but it looks great on Android. www.cir.ca
6) Sleep as Android. This app is a sleep-tracker and smart alarm. I'm not sold on the sleep tracking component -- you turn the phone on airplane mode and put it under your pillow and based on the amount of moving you do, it analyzes how well you slept. It doesn't usually seem to correspond very well to how refreshed I feel in the morning, so I've mostly given up on the sleep assessment.
However, what is useful about the app is the smart alarm. Within 30 minutes of your designated alarm time, the app will detect if you're moving, indicating that you're in light sleep, and will quietly chirp to wake you up. No more blaring alarms in the morning, no more waking up anyone else sleeping in the same room.
I used to get yanked out of bed, groggy and bleary, to a squawking alarm clock. Now it's a subtle little melody under my pillow that wakes me up before Jenna can even hear it. It doesn't wake me up perfectly refreshed and ready to go every morning, but the wake-up experience is a lot less painful. As a bonus, it keeps track of the hours I've slept each night so I can identify when I need to catch up on sleep. Free trial, $4.50 for the full version. (Android only. Find it on Google Play)
7) Accountable2You. The fundamental premise of an accountability program is that you have your internet activity monitored in reports that are sent to accountability partners to keep you on the straight and narrow. I've tried competitors Covenant Eyes and X3Watch in the past, and neither compare to Accountable2You. Covenant Eyes is more expensive and consistently slowed down my internet browsing speed. X3Watch is roughly the same price for the Premium version, which admittedly I never tried -- but the Free version, which promised many of the same features as the Premium version, was frustratingly glitchy and inconsistent. The interface was poorly designed and reports seemed to show up at random.
Accountable2You, recommended by my friend Kevin, is well designed, $5/month for unlimited users, devices and accountability partners, and it's working great. It doesn't slow my internet down and the reports show up on time as promised. It works on computers and smart devices so everything can be secured. This is what I've wanted for a while. If you feel like you need accountability software but haven't settled on an option, today's the day. Get Accountable2You. If $5/month seems steep, find some like-minded people and split the cost. Unlimited devices, unlimited users! www.accountable2you.com
8) Podcast Addict. Podcasts are nothing new but I didn't realize you could get them on Android. If I wanted to listen to podcasts in the past, I would have to carry around my old iPod and that was too many items for my pockets. Now the podcasts are on my phone, so I can tune in on my work commute or when I'm hanging around the apartment.
Podcasts fill the other half of my intellectual desires. I want to stay informed with the news and I want to keep learning new things. Circa takes care of the news. Podcasts take care of the learning. Admittedly, I've yet to find podcasts that are more learning and less talk show -- Freakonomics and How Stuff Works have rave reviews but spent a higher fraction of the time chatting than I'd prefer.
However, the gold I've found is sermons. Many churches put out sermons via podcasts, and downloading them this way puts them in a format that's easier for me to keep around and access than downloading mp3s from websites. I highly recommend the podcast Radical Together by David Platt. (Android only. Find it on Google Play)
9) YouVersion. This is the Bible app that everyone uses for those times you forget your Bible, but it has a feature I never took advantage of before -- Bible reading plans.
In the first place, this isn't a technical item, but I think everyone should have some kind of Bible reading plan. I never really have. I'd read this and that when I had the time. Now I'm doing a chronological plan so I don't have to plan anything new for the next 340 days. I just keep following the plan. Wow! If you do your plan through YouVersion then 1) it's always on your phone and 2) you get affirming checkmarks all over the place. (Find it on Google Play)
10) Google Tasks. This is the little list-keeping window in Gmail that you can bring up by clicking Tasks in the dropdown menu in the upper left-hand corner. It's a simple, no-frills task list. It's not shareable like Out of Milk (see below) but the interface is cleaner. I was tethered to my computer until I found out that there was an app to connect the list from Gmail to your phone. Unfortunately, the free version has ads and the full version is $1, but that's not much if you need to stay on top of your tasks.
Using Google Tasks is another way I take control of my life. 750 Words helps me figure goals out and Google Tasks helps me keep them in sight. I break my tasks down into Future Tasks, Current Tasks and then tasks oriented around specific goals, like Medical School or Tax Season. Having my tasks in front of me makes it easier to perceive progress when I need to slog through a mess of emails or forms or activities. And if something comes up that I don't have time to deal with, I can throw it on the task list and forget about it for the moment. (Find it on Google Play)
11) LastPass. This doesn't do anything to dramatically improve my life, but it's a constant source of convenience and it took about 6 minutes to set up, so any benefit is gravy, really. It's another browser add-on, available for all major browsers. It saves your username and passwords and then automatically inputs them when you visit those websites. You access LastPass using a master password (which you need to remember).
"Okay, but why not just save my password in the browser?" It's a lot less secure. More hackable -- Chrome for instance isn't protected by a master password.
"Okay, but I just use 'steve1234' on all websites so I remember it." No! -- you should have different passwords for different websites.. though I'm speaking as someone who didn't follow this advice until a few months ago. LastPass generates randomized passwords and then remembers them for you, so you can have 16-character super-secure passwords for all the websites you use and you don't have to remember what they are. Nice. All you have to remember is the master password.
It doesn't take much effort to install LastPass and upgrade the level of security you have on your devices. And it's free! www.lastpass.com
12) Out Of Milk. This is probably the simplest out of my app suggestions. It's a little collaborative list-maker. It's free and you can sync between multiple accounts, so Jenna and I share several lists. Nothing life-changing here, but it makes it easier to keep track of shopping lists and to-dos that we're both involved in. (Find it on Google Play)
-----
Hopefully one or more of these apps piqued your interest. Most of them are free. Most of them are super easy to get started with. I'm sure almost all of them could offer benefits to your life, however small.
If nothing else, I urge you to try 750 Words. If you've never had the experience of laying your thoughts out concretely for several days in a row, you have to try it. For me and a couple others I know that have given it a shot, it opens up a mental clarity that is hard to achieve elsewhere. It's not just the journaling, but it's the consistent journaling and self-probing. Go to 750words.com, sign up for the free trial and just try a week of journaling 750 words a day.
I'm not getting paid by 750 Words or anything. I've just found the benefits of intentional self-awareness to be far greater than the $5/month cost. And I hope you will too.
