When I was younger, I used to journal a lot. I had this idea that someday I would want to go through all my journals and learn the long-forgotten secrets of my youth. I was wrong indeed about that. The minutiae of what I thought 11th-grade boys turned out not to be something I’ve grown up to reach for. Having logs of dense paragraphs about my personal feelings started to feel kind of like having a closet full of old, junk. “I should go through it all someday, but I never have time …”

What is more enticing to me now is this idea of the quantified self. Apps thats make it easy to track what you are doing and actually turn that into meaningful, motivating data are a much easier, more fun way to understand myself. I’ve been using my Jawbone UP band for a long time to track my activity and sleep, and I’ve now added two more apps to my home screen (where the best apps get to go). These are Lift and Reporter, which, strangely enough, paint completely different pictures of who I am as a person. Both though, help motivate me to make sure I’m actually doing what I want with my life, and I suggest you try them too.

Lift:

Lift is incredibly simple. It’s a list of daily goals that you get to check off, and it lets you see at a glance at how often you’re doing them. I added a few goals to mine: study a language for half hour, work on my book for half hour, vegan before 6, floss, go to gym, walk to work, etc. Quickly, I found many uses for the app:

1. Feeling Better About Myself

I’m very competitive with myself when it comes to how I use my time and what I’m getting done. I quantify my time after work into 30 minute “units” just like that guy in About a Boy because it helps me get as much done as possible. This app actually had the strange effect of making me realize I can never get everything done in a day, but even on days when I feel lazy, I manage to at least accomplish a few of my goals. Sure maybe on weekend day I will be around people all day, but goddamit if I didn’t floss, play Duolingo, clean the apartment and read for half hour. And that’s better than nothing.

2. Getting that Refund for Going to the Gym

Before having Lift, I almost never got back the $20 I get if I go to L.A. Fitness 12 times a month. After getting this app, I have managed to get it every month (except one in which I switched my health insurance). Lift lets me easily see how many times I’m going to the gym and stay motivated to go more often. I get the satisfaction of checking something off my list, which is something. It’s extra gratifying because it’s not a work or school to-do list but a list of things I’m intrinsically motivated to do.

3. Actually Writing a Book

I’ve wanted to write a book since I was like 14 and now I’m actually doing it. I just put in the goal of “work on book for 30 minutes” and have actually started doing it almost every day. 30 minutes may not seem like much but after about 6 months I’ve gotten to about 60,000 words, which is basically book-length.

Am I starting to sound insufferable? Well, Lift makes you feel like a way better person. (Although it never quite motivated me to do vegan before 6. I just can’t enjoy vegan food really. And it’s expensive.)

Now, let’s switch to an app that paints a different picture of myself.

Reporter:

Reporter app was created by Nicholas Felton, who is famous for tracking everything he does and creating beautiful, quantified reports of his life. You should read the whole story behind the app here. It’s quite interesting. He designed Reporter app to help you start documenting your life in a simple, elegant way that’s one or two steps away from automation.

What you do is program your own report, including the questions you want it to ask you and how it keeps track of the data. You can create a report for when you wake up, to ask you things like how you slept, what you dreamed about and what you want to accomplish, and one before bed to help you think on what you accomplished that day and what you’re grateful for or whatever you would otherwise be journaling in a long-winded manner. The beauty is that here you can just rattle off a couple words, and see all your answers at a glance.

One of the most interesting questions for me has been the simple “What are you doing?” question. After using the app for about a week, I was tickled to see that most of my “what are you doings” were watching some t.v. show or another or eating something. But hey the Lift app says I’m so productive! This one is saying I’m lazy and gluttonous! I realized there was some error in that I was more likely to do a report if I was at home doing nothing than if I was in the middle of a meeting at work, but I’ve been trying to do them more in the latter circumstance to get a fuller picture of my life. Nonetheless, it does make me more self aware of how much time I’m spending actually not doing anything productive.

The data visualization is nothing to write home about yet, and the app takes some time to learn how to use. (For example, I assumed it would just ask me “wake” questions around the time I usually woke up and “asleep” questions around the time I usually go to sleep, but I eventually realized I had to manually toggle that option. Can’t it coordinate with Jawbone and learn these things! Maybe soon.)

But small problems with the app right now are really only places for it to grow. I can only see it getting cooler. Both of these apps do the magic of taking something complicated and making it easy, simple and fun. And because of that, I’m a little bit obsessed with them. You should try them too.

–Becky Lang