New Year’s resolutions with iPhone: how to achieve your goals

2021 holds a lot of anticipation as the world hopefully recovers from the pandemic and people around the world have more clarity about their priorities than ever before. Let’s take a look at some of the best apps for creating habits, setting interests, and achieving New Year’s resolutions with iPhone and Apple Watch.

Rethinking New Year’s resolutions

Although New Year’s resolutions may be a good place to start, they are often too broad and / or undefined. Another difficult aspect of New Year’s resolutions is that they can be linked to guilt and regret, especially if it’s something you’ve been striving for or struggling with for a while.

I find Tim Ferriss’ approach very valuable and effective: replace New Year’s resolutions with a “previous year review.” The idea is to deliberately look back at the last year (if possible with your calendar) and write down what things moved the needle in positive as well as negative directions for you.

Then determine which 20% of the things you have done have produced the most effective results (and guide what you need to do and avoid moving forward). Read more about this approach on Tim’s blog here. If you try, I think you’ll go into 2021 with more clarity on what’s important to you, what your goals really are, and more handy steps to get there. You can still achieve a New Year’s resolution (s), but the process of a recent year review should provide real added value.

Also keep in mind, while it can be tempting to tackle multiple new habits at once, many people find most success with fewer changes at once. James Clear’s bestseller for more reading on making and breaking habits Atomic Habits is very useful.

How to achieve New Year’s resolutions with iPhone and Apple Watch

iPhone and Apple Watch can be great tools to help you stay on top of your bigger goals and specifically the daily actions to make or break habits. Below we look at 4 great apps to reach your New Year’s resolutions with iPhone and Apple Watch.

Set interests

Stickk

I wanted to share this one first, as setting up real interests can be an important factor in creating new habits that achieve New Year’s resolutions. We often know what to do and how to do it, but do not take consistent steps, and for that Stickk was built.

Stickk comes from a behavioral economist and a professor of law at Yale University, and the main idea is ‘ENCOURAGEMENTS x RESPONSIBILITY = KEY TO SUCCESS’.

Here’s how the app works:

1. Set your goal – ANY goal (losing weight, self-care, meditation, completing a dissertation …) and a timeline to achieve it
2. Invite someone – a friend, colleague or family member – to hold you accountable and verify your progress
3. Put your money where your mouth is! Set a price for inactivity – add Stakes to your bet (optional)
4. Track your progress by reporting your successes or failures daily, weekly OR at the end of your commitment contract

Stickk is available for free for iPhone, Mac and the Internet. You can download it in the App Store.

Follow New Year’s resolutions with iPhone and Apple Watch

Ok, let’s look at some great programs to track your goals and habits:

Strepe

Streaks developer Crunchy Bagel describes the app as “The to-do list that helps you form good habits.” Allows you to track up to 12 tasks daily, is super customizable with 78 colored themes, 600 icons, and how often a task needs to be completed.

You also have support for widgets, Siri Shortcuts, Apple Health and more.

Streaks won an Editors’ Choice award from Apple and has a very high average rating of 4.8 / 5 stars from more than 14,000 reviewers.

Streaks is available for $ 4.99 in the App Store and works with iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and iMessage.

HabitMinder

This is another great app based on the same idea of ​​a to-do list focusing on habits. HabitMinder includes gadgets and “sessions” screens.

Other great features include Widgets, a clean and simple user interface, and it’s free to try before you buy it to unlock all the features of the app.

User love HabitMinder with an average rating of 4.7 / 5 stars in almost 4,000 reviews. It is available for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.

HabitMinder is available as a free download in the App Store with a lifetime license of $ 19.99, an annual subscription at $ 9.99 and a monthly $ 0.99.

Achievements

This is a new app that takes an interesting approach to include both your big picture goals and the habits that will help you achieve them.

The focus is on a minimalist UI with haptic feedback and good sound effects. It also has Widgets and is customizable with icons and 5 colored themes. Achievements also contains more than 300 quotes for inspiration.

Although only an iPhone app is available, developer 2196 told us that an Apple Watch app is available with a statistics page and support for more languages.

Achievements are available as a $ 4.99 download in the App Store.

Apple’s applications

If you do not want to upload a new app to help your habits and New Year’s resolutions on iPhone and Apple Watch, you can always use the built-in Reminder app and create recurring alerts.

If you want to be more detailed, you can also create subtasks in the Reminder app, and also use the Notes app for journaling / tracking longer form.

And if you have a health-related goal, you can keep track of your workouts in the Fitness app and other details in the Health app.

Connect with New Year’s resolutions with the iPhone

I try to keep in mind that the most important thing is not what tool I use to keep track of my progress, but it’s actually about being consistent with the daily action of creating a new habit.

Apps can be a part of achieving New Year’s resolutions with the iPhone and the apps above are great. But clarity, encouragement, accountability and follow-up are what will make the real difference. Cheers for the new year and achieving your goals!

---

Check out 9to5Mac on YouTube for more Apple news: