I love a good app. I download (mostly free) apps all the time, but rarely do they improve my life, so I end up deleting most of them after a couple weeks. Here are a few of my favorites that have made the cut time and time again.
Book Crawler: This app helps me keep track of my reading. You can add books by scanning the barcode (the quickest and my favorite), looking them up on Google Books, or entering the information in manually. From there you can tag and sort them any way you want. I like to tag books by subject. I also separate the books into 3 categories: To Read, Reading Now, and Read. This helps me keep track of what I’ve read and what I want to read next. Every time I get a book recommendation, I quickly add it to the list. It’s help make me a more avid and directed reader.
Evernote: A great note taking app that I use on my iPhone and laptop. I also like the button available for Chrome that allows me to clip photos, articles, or whole pages from the internet. It was a great tool for quickly pulling resources for my style class and sifting through them later. I wish I’d known about it in college.
Sleep Cycle: I got this app after reading Tori’s blog post about it. The app tracks your movements in your sleep. You set a half hour window in which you’d like to wake up, and the alarm goes off during a light phase of sleeping. The goal is to wake up more naturally rather than yanked out of deep sleep. I was skeptical at first, but the app really does wake you up during a light cycle of sleep. Yes, it’s incredibly J of me to track my sleeping, but I feel better in the mornings and the charts I get every morning are fun to look over. Also, I now know that on average I get about 8 hours of sleep every night. A lot more than I had originally thought!
Wunderlist: This is just a simple list app I use this to keep track of my blog post ideas. I love the sleek design. I also keep this app on my desktop for quick reference while blogging. You can also share the lists with other people.
Hours Tracker: Since I work so many jobs, I have a lot of hours to document. Hours Tracker is an easy to use app that lets me set wages and overtime for each job. There’s also a feature for factoring taxes. At the end of each pay period, you can easily export the hours in a document and email.
