Editor Note: This post is done in collaboration with GamStop and should not be considered an editorial endorsement
It is universally believed that the key to a happy, healthy, and long life is building good habits and breaking bad habits. Especially after the pandemic, where 62% of people are still trying to come out of bad habits formed during the pandemic. But building new habits is not as easy as it sounds, and breaking an age-old habit is near impossible for some people.
However, the most effective way to build new habits is to track them and set reminders for them, and an app specially built for that purpose can be the most convenient solution. Smartphones can remind users the case have something some tasks left that day, and this gradually helps build the necessary habits.
Criteria For a Good Habit Tracker
There are a plethora of habit trackers scattered across the internet, but every good habit tracker has to have a few features like:
- It should create a visual cue that can remind the user of a certain task at hand
- It should motivate with texts or stickers the progress the users are making
- The app has to give an incentive not to break the steak
- It should make the user feel satisfied to record their success at the moment
Keeping these parameters in mind, let’s get into overviewing some of the most popular and effective mobile applications for habit management.
Apps That Can Help You Control and Develop Your Habits
The following list of applications is not exhaustive — perhaps, it would be physically impossible to mention on a single page all the apps worth trying out. However, we believe that the list below will come in handy as a reference point if you decide to start managing your habits with the help of mobile technologies.
Goalify
Goalify is another app that can help increase consistency on certain things. It’s a smart app that can be used quickly, easily, and effectively record to any number of goals or other tasks that the user would like to accomplish. Its versatility allows you to use it as one of the gaming control apps, a habit tracker, a progress meter, or in other ways suitable for you.
Goalify provides dynamic reminders, helpful tips, and even custom push notifications. Not only that, users are even offered useful information on their goal performance and detailed advice on how to improve themselves. It even allows sharing progress which not only inspires others to form better habits but also gives the users something to take pride in.
Streaks
The Streaks app is a habit tracker in the form of a to-do list that helps the user form good habits. Every day the user completes a task, their streak is extended. The tasks can be anything from waking up and making the bed to walking a dog. Working on something every day helps people form new habits. As long as they don’t break the chain, their streak will keep increasing or it will be reset to zero days. This would motivate users not to lose focus and keep doing the tasks to get the streaks going.
GamStop
GamStop is a habit tracker that is kind of different from the other trackers featured in the list but it is no less useful. It is essentially a free, independent self-exclusion scheme for people who have gambling addiction or other related problem habits.
If gamblers register their details with GamStop, they get to choose how long they want to be banned from these gambling and gaming sites. While subscribed to GamStop, they would not be able to log on to gambling websites, and thus this would automatically help them break their addiction or bad habit of excessive gambling and thus help the users detox. Even though you can find a casino with no GamStop, this is still an effective method to keep problem gambling under control.
Habitica
Habitica is a very unique and free habit tracker with RPG features built in. As a user completes their tasks for the day, they also build up the stats for a character in the game. This character can then join parties, go on quests, and even get new gear. Thus this type of motivation is always useful in building habits. Unless statistics, buffs, and other data overwhelm or distract a user, it is a very interesting habit tracker.
However, even without the RPG, the gamification of Habitica can still be unique and captivating. Especially because in case of failure to do a task, the character might lose some of its abilities or gears, and this would motivate people not to ignore the tasks.
HabitBull
HabitBull’s habit tracker app uses a simple but powerful UI, so a whole month’s progress can be seen at a glance. Thus it is super easy to track the day the user broke a habit in that month. More importantly, their app has graphs and charts showing visual data on how the user performed with their habits and what success percentage they were able to achieve as opposed to their desired goals. All of this data is even transformable into CSV format, which gives the users the ability to analyze them themselves.
Conclusion
If people desire to make certain lifestyle changes by changing a habit, they might need some extra help. Among all the popular Android blockers, habit trackers take a special place in this regard. It is a modern and convenient way of building much-needed good habits. These habits can help them overcome addiction and even suppress certain less-harmful bad habits like lethargy, smoking, and drinking.
Thus, enabling the users to become much more efficient and confident in their lives. Thus in this way, they can gain positivity and motivation from these tasks. These trackers make the user feel a sense of achievement when they complete tasks and thus continue to push them till they do not need to be reminded anymore.
