New year tech: Apps that will help you acquire good habits

Apps to help you calm, destress and stick to your plans

Photograph: iStock

Ready to kick off the New Year, new you section of the month? Here are a few apps to help guide the way.

Habitminder

Good habits are hard to make and harder to keep. The bad habits though? They seem to creep up on us all the time. So it’s nice to have a reminder to develop healthy habits. That is where HabitMinder comes in. Relaxation? Deep breathing? Keeping up with your eight glasses of water a day? All covered. There are reminders (because one habit of mine is forgetting things that aren’t immediately important) to gently prod you to walk away from your desk or schedule in some family time, and when you’ve completed your requisite task, you update the app. Which, ironically, is another habit in itself.

Alternatives: Habitica, StickK

Udemy

Whether it is furthering your business skills or developing your personal ones, Udemy has a course that will help. The online training app has courses for everything from learning to play the piano or training in reiki to machine learning and team building. Some courses are free of charge, others cost from €10. There are over 65,000 courses on offer, with 20 million students signing up to take them. The only problem will be narrowing down which course you’d like to take.

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Alternatives: Linkedin Learning, Udacity

Moment

Smartphones have taken over our lives, but some more than others. If you feel your phone is starting to dominate your life, you can try to track your screen time with an app to see just how bad the problem is. Moment is one such app, although Android has its digital wellbeing add-on and iOS has a built in screen time monitor. Moment will not only give you all the information you need, but also help you break that addiction to your smartphone.

Alternatives: Space, Mute

Calm

Learning to meditate can be a good way to destress your life, teaching you to focus on the here and now and calm your worries. Calm will give you the option of a few free courses - guided meditation for seven or 21 days, and meditation for anxiety, sleep and confidence – but a premium subscription will open up more involved courses.

Alternatives: Headspace, Breathe