Regardless of how you did in 2021, you have another chance to make the new year better than the ones before it. We set New Year's resolutions with the best of intentions, but it's no wonder that so many people fail after just a few weeks. It is important to have a supportive group of people cheering you on, but it is also important to have tools that make it easier to achieve your goals. Whether you want to get healthy, be more organized, or read more, there are tech tools that can help.
A fitness tracker.
A fitness tracker can show you daily data about your steps, sleep patterns and more, helping you start your exercise journey. The Inspire 2 is an all-around good option, not only because it is fairly affordable at $100, but because it does pretty much everything a beginner would need a fitness tracker to do. The device has a feature that can be used to monitor sleep, calories, heart rate, and more, and it comes with 20 goal-based exercises that you can manually track. It has 10-day battery life, so you don't have to take it off to charge it. You will be able to find the device more easily if you misplace it.
There is a wristwatch.
The Apple Watch SE is a good choice if you want an all-purpose Wearable that also has serious fitness chops. The Series 7 does not include some of the bells and whistles that the Series 7 does, but it still has the same experience. watchOS finally does basic sleep tracking, and it tracks all day activity and heart rate. In addition to built-in gps for outdoor workouts, it supports dozens of trackable exercises along with fall detection and high and low heart rate notifications. When it comes to table-stakes smartwatch features, the Apple Watch is the better option over basic fitness trackers, as well as being able to send and receive text messages from the device.
There are workout classes.
Millann is shown via the images.
If running isn't your thing, or it's just inconvenient to do it where you live, finding exercise classes that you enjoy can make working out a habit you're more likely to stick with for the long haul. If you prefer to do this through your local gym, there are plenty of online fitness classes that you can participate in from the comfort of your living room. I have tried a lot of these services, but my favorite has to be Peloton. You don't need a bike or treadmill to take advantage of the classes. The app-only version of the subscription costs $13 per month and it allows you to take many of the classes that require little to no equipment at all.
The internet has tons of free exercise resources if you can't afford another monthly subscription fee. If you want to watch hundreds of workout videos and even assign them to specific days of the week, you can use the free website Fitness Blender. I like the quality and consistency of their videos, but you may connect more to workout videos on YouTube if they are taught by instructors you like; Heather Robertson and Move with Nicole are two personal favorites.
Habit tracker.
Keeping track of new habits can help you stick to them. If you wander down the rabbit hole, a habit- tracking app is probably the easier option. You can log when you completed a new habit or avoided a bad habit with Done and Strides. You can set reminders to log and review your statistics, as well as customizing how often you want to do a task. You will be asked to subscribe to both apps after you create a few habits.
If you don't want to pay for another subscription, consider an app like Streaks, which will give you all yours for a fee. Grow is a free app that takes a similar approach to habit tracking that Forest takes with time management. You can plant a virtual tree for every new habit you track. Habitica is a game that turns habit tracking into an 8-bit game in which your custom avatar levels up every time you log a task.
To-do and note-taking applications.
Things 3.
One way to get back on track is to find organizational tools that work for you, and make sure those tools are easy to use. The worst thing that could happen is that your to-do list or note-taking system becomes so cumbersome that you don't use it. It can be difficult to keep all of your tasks in your head when you have a lot of things to do. I like Things for macOS because it's simple and detailed, but also because it's detailed enough for big work projects. The Today view shows everything that requires immediate attention, and I love it.
Things is only available for Apple devices, so you will have to spend $80 to get it. Microsoft's To Do is an alternative that is free and works on almost every platform, including Windows, and is less involved than Things 3. You can either keep it simple and have a grocery list, or you can go deeper and add due dates, sub- tasks and even share lists with family members. If you don't want to bother with an extraneous app, you can always opt for the reminders app that came on your phone. Reminders would be for users of the two platforms.
If you have been constantly writing down ideas for new projects on Post-It notes or scraps of paper that you eventually lose, then you should use the note-taking app, called Google Keep. There are plenty of other note-taking apps out there as well as Apple Notes, which is the default option for this on iOS devices. I like to use Evernote because it has become my digital file box. I take notes in it almost every day, but a lot of things come to me through my email and eventually get saved and tagged in Evernote so I can find them in the future.
Password manager.
1Password
A password manager is a great place to start if you want to improve your organization game in the new year. I like 1Password, but there are many other options, including a free version of LastPass. You only need to remember one name to log in to your 1Password account after you have saved all of your passwords. You can log in with the proper credentials with just a few clicks with the browser extensions Chrome, Edge and others, and 1Password has apps for most platforms, so you can use it on all of your devices.
The Password Generator feature helps you create a new password when one of yours has expired. Dashlane has a free tool that anyone can use to make more secure passwords. It makes it easy to get old credentials with new ones, because you don't have to come up with a strong key.
Travel tech is organized.
The dual-office life is one of the consequences of the past two. When you arrive at your office or home office, you want to leave your mouse, charging cable, and dongle at your other desk, but you don't want to mess with your backpack and find out you left it at your other desk.
BagSmart tech organizers have a number of pockets and dividers and are water resistant, so they can prevent this before it happens. They come in different sizes so you can choose the best one for your bag. Bellroy's desk pouch is a good option if you want something a bit more elevated. The bag is more expensive but you get a more elegant design with a higher-quality material and a structured base.
A docking station for computers.
It is easy for your work-from- home setup to get messy quickly. When you are at your busiest times at work, it is not a good idea to think about cable management, but tidying up your workspace can make your day more enjoyable and efficient.
We recommend that you have a docking station that will keep your laptop, monitors, accessories and the like in check. CalDigit has a couple good options, including the Universal Docking Station. The latter has a rectangular design with a total of 16 different ports on it, including a Gigabit Ethernet jack, five USB-A connections, two Thunderbolt 3 sockets and analog audio in/out ports. The latter has 13 connections, including HDMI and DVI ports, and is on your desk. Plugable has a device that comes with both DVI to HDMI and DVI to VGA, so you can choose which monitor you have.
While both of those options are stationary, there are plenty of adapters out there that can give you similar organization while on the go. The affordable solution includes an HDMI port, a microSD card reader, two USB-C connections, and two USB-A ports. You can charge your laptop through the hub if it supports 100W power pass-through.
The Instant Pot is portable.
Best Buy Instant Pot.
Eating healthier can be challenging because it usually means cooking more at home. It is especially difficult when you are starting from zero because it takes more time than ordering in from your phone. The process can be made easier with the help of an Instant Pot. You can find a lot of recipes in which you simply throw a bunch of ingredients into the pot, set it and forget it until you are ready to eat.
We recommend the Instant Pot Duo for beginners because it combines seven different cooking methods into one appliance and is relatively affordable. The three-quart model is fine if you are primarily cooking for yourself and a partner, but we recommend the six-quart model if you are frequently cooking for four or more. The Instant Pot Duo Crisp, which includes an air-fry lid, and the Instant Pot Ultra, which includes a few extra modes like cake maker and egg cooker, are both great for cooking at home.
The recipe organization.
RichLegg via a picture.
One of the great things about cooking at home is that you can find recipes that you love so much that you want to make them again and again. You want to keep those recipes safe and readily available so you can refer to them when you need a quick weeknight meal or a dish to bring to your next family reunion. You can use recipe cards to build up your meals over time. If you want a cookbook of sorts that you fill in yourself over time, then a recipe book is the better choice.
Paprika's recipe management app is the best solution for keeping your recipes accessible at all times. The $5 app acts as your digital recipe box, allowing you to enter your own recipes as well as download them from the internet. You know those hundreds of words that precede online recipes, in which the author spills their entire life story before telling you their secret to making moist cornbread? Paprika only saves the ingredient list and the instructions. You can make grocery lists and keep track of pantry essentials in the app, so it will become one of your most-used kitchen tools.
The app is for reading.
Don't get into the habit of scrolling down on the social media site every day. The internet is a good place to start looking for other things to read. It connects you with your local library's digital collection, allowing you to borrow and download all kinds of e-books, audiobooks, magazines, graphic novels and more. You can use the tag system in the app to save titles for later without actually putting a hold on them. If you find a bunch of audiobooks you eventually want to get to, you can give them all a TBR tag so you can quickly find them and borrow one when you need new reading/listening material.
I love how easy it is to borrow from my local library without leaving my home, as I use Libby on a regular basis. There are many times when my library doesn't have a title I'm looking for. If that happens to you often, you may want to consider a subscription service like Scribd or Amazon's Kindle unlimited, which give you unlimited access to a wide library of e-books for $10 per month. If you want to support the local bookstore you want to support with your purchases, you can use Libro.fm, which allows you to choose the local bookstore you want to support.
The e-reader has a screen.
E-readers are still around because so many people know how much better it is to read e-books on a dedicated device. You could read on your phone or computer, but staring at those screens all day long can be tiring for your eyes. An e-reader that focuses on reading is a better choice than an e-reader that is more comfortable. If you have ever picked up your phone intending to finish a chapter only to be distracted by email, you know how important this is.
The new Paperwhite has a 6.8-inch display with warm lights, a 20 percent faster page turn, and weeks of battery life. The Clara HD has a 6-inch E-ink display, a color temperature that can be adjusted, and weeks of battery life. The Paperwhite is the best option if you already get most of your books through Amazon. If you connect a pair of earbuds to the e-reader, you can listen to audiobooks. The device supports a number of file types, including EPUB, PDF and MOBI. You can borrow library books directly from the e-reader with on-device integration.
