Hello everyone!

I’m sorry I haven’t been as active as I once was here… it’s been a while since I’ve posted regularly because I’ve taken on a lot of work, and I had to lower the blog in my priorities. I’m starting to see the free seconds at the end of the tunnel though, so don’t despair!

There are a lot of things I use every day to increase my productivity, and I’ve been thinking lately that I’m going to start making lists of useful things. Here are some of my favorite habit-changing apps.

RescueTime

This is one of the best apps out there. It’s a diagnostic app that tracks what you do when you’re on your computer to show you how much time you actually spend doing things. It’ll track your social media time, the time you spend on Word, the time you spend on email, and it gives you a weekly report by email telling you what proportion of your time was spent doing what. You can even check the website whenever you want to get an idea of how you’ve been doing the past hour, the past day, the past few days.

Knowing how you spend your time is the first step toward changing your habits and managing your time efficiently; you can also look at these reports and figure out what your peak hours for work really are, when you are really focused, because impressions can be deceiving.

HabitRPG

This is another great one, and is completely different from RescueTime. This one is a phone app. I have it on my Android, but I do believe it is also available for iOS. It’s like a little RPG that rewards you with treasure and experience whenever you get things done. You can also find items that can help you feed pets, fight monsters, etc.

You basically input a few good and bad habits you have that you want to sustain or give up, and every time you repeat a bad habit, it takes something away from you (mostly HP.) Whenever you do something right, it rewards you. It also has a sections for daily tasks and a to-do list, which also gives you rewards when you get things done, and punishes you if you neglect things too long.

WriteTrack

This isn’t exactly an app, but a website, and it is strictly for writing. It’s a website that lets you put in specific word count goals over periods of time that you determine, and then you can mark the days during that period where you plan on writing less or more, which divides your goal into a daily goal. Then, you can input how many words you’ve actually written each day, and you can see the rest of your daily word count goal adjusted depending on what you’ve put in. You can even connect with friends who will see your word count goal and how much you’re putting in, and tweet your progress directly from the site to keep yourself accountable.

The accountability part is absolutely great, but it’s also awesome to see where you are with regards to your goal, and how one good day (or one bad day) can have repercussions on the whole project. It also gets addictive to see that little progress bar go up – it’s what makes things like NaNoWriMo so appealing to a lot of people, seeing that word count bar go up, and this way you get to have that all year!