My particular case
I have always been a very curious person with a tendency to start different projects. It happens to me that I drop the project when it does not motivate me. If I already have the knowledge to complete the project and all that’s left is to spend hours on it, my motivation goes down.
This behavior ends up frustrating me because I want to finish projects, not leave them unfinish.
For this discipline is more important than motivation. And to have discipline, a set of good habits is required.
With the goal of creating good habits and forgetting about the bad ones, I helped myself with a few apps.
Apps
I’m going to tell you which ones I use and how I use them.
There are a lot of alternatives for all of these apps. It depends on each of you to find the one that you like and use it as it serves you best.
Loop Habit Tracker
It allows me to keep a log of my habits’ fulfillment and create alarms for each one.
The bigger problem that I have with new habits is that I forget about them, so when I want to start one, I create new alarms.
Once I have used to it, I remove the alarm. I only leave notifications without sound to review at the end of the day.
It’s important not to try to add too many new habits at once. If you can, add them one by one.
Microsoft To Do: Lists & Tasks
It’s a very complete To-Do app. You could use it together with GTD for example.
In my case, I use it only when I have a lot of things to do and could forget some. Or when a task is too big, I break it up into a few small tasks.
Simple Time Tracker
With this app you can keep track of each thing you spend time doing.
It is interesting how it could be used. I only add activities that I want to spend time doing. I do not add activities about the things I don’t want to do. For example; I wouldn’t add an activity about mindlessly browsing the Internet. I do add activities about reading, sleeping or playing videogames.
The idea is trying to have the maximum time registered each day. That means that we have spent time doing what we wanted to do instead of falling into involuntary activities that make us lose time like accessing social media because we can’t register that time in the app.