10 min read
The Best Life-Tracking Apps of 2016
Best apps for healthy eating and weight loss
MyFitnessPal makes counting calories easier than ever. Its huge database contains nutritional information on just about everything you could possibly eat. If you cook something yourself, you can input the ingredients and it will calculate the caloric value. It also saves your favorite foods which makes inputting your meals every day easy and quick. HealthyOut is a boon for those of us who prefer to eat out, but still want to eat healthy. Input your address and then add filters for cuisine and the app will present you with menus offering the healthiest options available. Rise is an affordable dietician. Begin by consulting a nutrition coach and then start taking photos of your snacks and meals to send through the app. For $20 a month, your personal dietician will check-in with you to offer feedback and tips on how to improve your eating habits.Best apps for exercise and fitness
Nike+ Training Club gives you regular new workouts with easy-to-follow instructional and motivational videos. It also connects you with friends so that you can push each other to continue working towards your goals. There’s a huge selection of workouts so that you can tailor your experience to your skill level. Fitnet helps you perform exercises correctly. It provides real-time feedback to keep you focused and on-point. As you follow workout videos from trainers, the app uses the camera on your phone or tablet to tell you how well you’re doing the exercises and keeping up with the workout (so no cheating!). Xiaomi Mi Band, Jawbone UP, and Fitbit Flex are just a few exercise-tracking wearables to help you meet your fitness goals. Even if you’re not sure what your fitness goals are yet, simply wearing the data-tracking devices will help you measure your current baseline and use those to set exercise goals for the immediate and long term future.
Best apps for sleeping
The Zeo Headband is a personal sleep manager that fits comfortably around your head while you sleep. It comes with a bedside display that shows last night's sleep data and stores up to two weeks of data for easy viewing. When you wake up, it gives you a personal sleep score - your “ZQ” - and shows a graph of your Light, Deep and REM sleep over the course of the night. It even has a “SmartWake” alarm feature that monitors your sleep in order not to wake you directly from a deep sleep. That’s only one of its many features to help you improve the quality of your sleep - making it a must-try life-tracking wearable for anyone who struggles to get a good night’s sleep. Sleep Cycle is a simpler mobile app (for those who aren’t ready for a wearable). While the Zeo comes with tons of functionalities, the Sleep Cycle’s focus is to help those who have trouble waking up do so more successfully. By placing your phone near or on your bed, the app uses motion detectors and sound to measure what cycle of sleep you’re in, and then wakes you up when it’s detected you’re in the lightest possible stage of sleeping.Best apps for mood improvement
MoodPanda is for those of us who struggle to maintain a good mood but aren’t sure why. Use this journaling app to log your mood and track your activities throughout the day. Over time, you’ll get a picture (literally - graphs and charts) of the days you were most and least happy. Then you can see trace back through those days to see what triggered your good or bad mood. Moodscope is a similar app that allows users not only to track their moods but moreover share their mood updates with friends. You can also “play” a regular card game designed by psychologists to take an accurate assessment of your moods. Happiness is an app that uses clean design and simple user experience to track your emotional states and the triggers behind them. The app aggregates the information you journal into infographics to give users a clear picture of their mental wellness, helping to improve your self-awareness. Emotion Sense logs your mood by sending you short surveys throughout your day. It’s run from a database at the University of Cambridge. The app collects information on your mental state based on the survey as well as the way you use your phone. Over time, the aggregated information provides a fascinating picture of yourself.Best apps for time management
Remember the Milk is a simple task manager that you can link to your Google alerts, Evernote, Outlook or Siri in order to ensure you’re on top of all the little things that need doing. Simply make a note of it and be reminded later at the appointed time. Checky performs a vital service - tracking how often you check your phone. Research shows we are on our phones for 23 out of 365 days in the year. Those are some depressing statistics, but you can break the habit with this app. Checky will tell you how often you check your phone and in what situations. So if you’re spending your subway ride home staring at your phone, no big deal. But if you’re frequently checking your phone during family dinner, you might want to check yourself. RescueTime is another app we all need. If you’re one of those computer, phone or tablet users who surfs the web in bed only to find another night wasted to Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr or your addicting website of choice, you should use RescueTime. It works by running in the background on your device, tracking the time you spend on various applications and website to give you an accurate picture of your day. Set alerts to tell you when to stop browsing a certain website or track how much time you spend answering emails every day. You can even block yourself from accessing those website you are particularly addicted to. Pocket is an easy way to come back to what you’re doing without wasting too much time every day staring at screens. When you’re surfing the web and you come upon something you want to read but you don’t have time for the full 4,000 words, or you find a video you want to watch but you haven’t brought your earphones, simply use Pocket to save and view later.
Best apps for goal-setting
Habit List is an app that helps you reach your goals by creating good habits and breaking unhealthy ones. Set your prioritized tasks for the day, stay on track with reminders and view trends over time to follow your progress and find motivation to keep going. stickK makes use of a “Commitment Contract” to help you achieve your goals: define your goal, outline what steps and timeline will be needed to accomplish it, and add accountability - select friends to be your motivators and post updates as you work towards your goal. Coach.me is there for you when you can’t afford a real life coach. Though deluxe versions of the tool offer full career coaching, you can download the free habit-tracking app to learn a new skill, improve your happiness and relationships, be more productive and challenge yourself to something new. Track, set targets and celebrate milestones. Habits uses scientifically proven methods to encourage a continuous chain or repetition of an activity in order to internalize and retain it for good. It also provides the option to share your good habit chains over social media to leverage a support network of friends in your self-improvement journey. AskMeEvery is the simplest tool available for goal progress tracking. It’s a website that allows you to set yourself a specific question to ask you every day via email or text. Every day you send in your answer and the site tracks your progress over time and shares the visualized data with you.
Best apps for mindfulness
Reporter is a simple app that sends you surveys and quizzes throughout the day which is then collated into graphs. It’s an easy way to track whatever you want, similar to AskMeEvery but slightly more thorough. Take stock of your daily habits - even those you’re not fully aware of - to increase mindfulness and self-reflection. If you don’t have an Apple device, check out similar app Daytum. Equanimity sets aside time in your busy day for meditation. Clear your mind, learn to observe, but take a step back from your thoughts every day with this app. When the timer is up, soft chimes will alert you to bring you gently back to the realities of your day.
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