New Year’s resolutions are all well and good on the January 1st, but after a few weeks, it’s easy to fall back into old routines and throw those well-intentioned aspirations to the wayside.
Make good on your goals in 2017 with these 22 apps that can help you succeed at your new year endeavors.
From learning a new instrument to traveling the world, these apps promise to help you in making this year one for the books!
1. Learn a New Language With Duolingo
You’ve always entertained that dream of learning French and moving to Paris. The first step is mastering the language of love, and Duolingo can help get you there.
With fun lessons for 10 different languages, Duolingo gamifies the process of learning a new language for added incentive. All lessons are free, and you can even practice the skills you’ve learned with the app’s conversation bots!
2. Organize Finances With Mint
Money management can be tough, especially when it comes to juggling loans, credit cards, savings accounts, and 401ks. Mint makes it easy to keep track of all your accounts in one seamless dashboard.
Mint can help you create budgets, track bills, alert you to interest charges or fees, and other finance-focused actions!
3. Save More Money with Acorn
Mint helps you set up budgets and manage your finance accounts, but what about when it comes to the logistics of saving money?
Acorn is an app that makes it easy to invest without requiring willpower to set aside major dollars each month. Acorn can be set up to automatically invest your spare change into various bonds and stocks, helping you grow your money without thinking twice about it.
You can also set up reccurring daily, weekly, or monthly investments to keep you committed to saving and investing parts of your paycheck that may otherwise be blown on late night takeout and laser tag (or however you let loose on the weekends).
4. Improve Memory with Lumosity
Lumosity is the brain-boosting app that helps you exercise that all-important mind muscle through memory, attention, problem solving, flexibility, and processing speed exercises.
With over 50+ delightful and well-designed games, you’ll have fun while staying sharp.
5. Drink More Water With Waterlogged
There are tons of reasons why we should all be drinking more water – you’ll eat less, your skin will be healthier, and you’ll feel more energized!
Despite knowing we should drink more water, it can be hard to commit to chugging all that H20. Waterlogged is an app that helps you meet your recommended daily water intake by reminding you to drink up throughout the day and tracking your water consumption.
Stay healthier and drink up with help from Waterlogged!
6. Learn Guitar With Uberchord
Always dreamed of starting a band, but never mastered the bass? Uberchord can help you realize your high school fantasy of becoming a real-world rock star.
This interactive guitar trainer helps you master chords with fingering feedback and hit perfect rhythm with a strumming guide.
The app can even use your phone’s microphone to recognize the chords you’re playing (and help you adjust when you’re off).
Track your progress and improve to become a true headline act with Uberchord!
7. Learn To Code With Mimo
Coding is an immensely valuable skill these days, with many livelihoods centered on the web and its many languages.
Duolingo can help you speak German or French, but Mimo is where it’s at when it comes to learning the tech-speak of coding languages.
Mimo’s gamified learning app can guide you through a variety of coding language lessons, from HTML and CSS to JavaScript and Swift.
Learn code on your phone while you commute with Mimo!
8. Find A New Job With Planted
Applying for a new job can be tough – especially when your current gig takes up so much of your time. Between scouring job board sites and LinkedIn, writing cover letters, and formatting resumes, it often feels easier to just stick it out at your existing job, despite knowing there are better opportunities out on the horizon.
Planted alleviates some of the employment application agony by making it easy and – dare I say – even a little fun to apply to new jobs.
Planted has you upload your resume, fill out a few questions about what kind of jobs you’re on the hunt for, and then the app takes over.
Each day, Planted throws you a few short and sweet job descriptions for available positions at various startups. All you need to do is click yes or no. Basically, Planted is Tinder for jobs.
If you say yes, Planted will send over your resume and get the ball rolling for you. Planted even claims to have an “in” with tons of startup teams, acting as your personal referral to fast-track your resume into the hands of hiring managers.
Planted even learns what jobs you like and dislike based on the gigs you rejoice over or reject.
It should be noted that Planted primarily works with start-ups, so if you’re looking for employment opportunities at more established companies, Planted might not do much for you. However, for start-up fans, Planted definitely takes some stress out of the job application process.
9. Go To The Gym (No Excuses) with Pact
Right, we all have those New Year’s resolutions about going to the gym more often and working out regularly, but let’s face it - those promises are easy to break. Pact makes your put money where your mouth is.
With Pact, you put money into a fund with a commitment to meet a goal – whether that’s going to the gym 3 times a week or eating healthier. When you meet your goal, you earn money, paid out by members who didn’t follow through on their own goals. If you break your resolutions, then other members get paid out with that money you set aside.
Putting real life cash on the line can definitely provided added motivation for those who normally let their resolutions languish.
10. Improve Your Credit Score With Credit Karma
Who doesn’t want a perfect 850 credit score? Credit Karma is a free app that can help you get there.
Get full reports on your credit score and see the various factors that contribute to your score and where you can improve. They can even monitor your account for suspicious activity and send you alerts.
11. Make New Friends With Meetup
Many of us live teched-out, semi-socially awkward lives that can make acquiring new friends through serendipity alone difficult, if not nearly impossible.
Meetup is a great people-oriented app that helps connect you with folks in your local area who have similar passions and interests. Traditionally if you wanted to find a fellow group of jugglers to clown around with, you’d have to hunt pretty hard online, and even then might only find a handful of other clown-enthusiasts several towns over.
With Meetup, you can just start a group and watch new members roll in – or join an existing group. In bigger cities, you can find interest groups for everything from hiking and book clubs to dinner groups and LARPing.
Best of all, people who join Meetup groups are often looking for new friends, just like you are, making it easy to build new relationships with those of a similar mindset.
12. Be More Mindful With Headspace
Mindfulness was big in 2016 and promises to carry through to 2017 as well. Keep calm and be more present with the meditation app Headspace.
Headspace offers free (and paid, once you complete the freebies) meditation exercises to help provide peace of mind and ease anxiety in our often stressed-out lives. Take a deep breath and live calmer in 2017 with Headspace!
13. Eat Better With My Fitness Pal
There are tons of great healthy eating apps out there, but MyFitnessPal is definitely one of the biggest and more established contenders.
MyFitnessPal has over 5 million foods in its nutritional database, covering everything from fast food mainstays to smaller mom and pop spots. MyFitnessPal can even track calories and nutritional info from Internet recipes – just copy and paste the URL!
This app is definitely a solid choice for helping you eat healthier in the new year!
14. Get Rid Of Old Clutter With Poshmark
Get rid of your old clothes and update your wardrobe with a little help from Poshmark.
Poshmark lets you snap photos of your old clothes, choose a price, and sell those old threads, all through your phone. Just be careful because you can buy clothes on Poshmark too, and once you open the app, you may have a hard time resisting other users’ offerings!
15. Find Love With Happn
Many dating apps have different angles – some are designed to give women the upper hand (like Lulu and Bumble), while others promise to sync you up to users who are 2nd or 3rd degree connections from Facebook or other social media apps (like Coffee Meets Bagel and Hinge).
Happn is a dating app that prefers to work through the magic of serendipity, showing you users who you’ve physically crossed paths with throughout the day. It’s classier, less creepy Craigslist Missed Connections (although albeit maybe only slightly less creepy depending on your stomach for such things).
If you’re dying to catch the eye of that cute barista but just can’t muster the courage, Happn maybe give you the second chance you need to see sparks fly!
16. Run More With Zombies, Run
Zombies, Run is a personal favorite app of mine, and I try to include it on all “top app” lists whenever I can.
Zombies, Run, which functions as a beautiful lovechild between Audible and RunKeeper, is a story-based running app.
You play the role of Runner 5 – a zombie apocalypse survivor-turned-supply-runner that must go out on various missions to protect Abel Township, a community comprised of other survivors.
Through radio broadcasts, you’ll learn the mysteries surrounding the various characters of Abel Township and work to find a cure to the zombie outbreak, all while running.
The app intersperses audio chapters with your own music playlist to provide a mix of story and jams. My favorite feature is the zombie chase sequences, which occur a couple times during each run. Zombie chases require you to run faster for a certain period of time to escape flesh-hungry zombies, who you can hear breathing down your neck. This can definitely make running a bit spooky when out in the woods alone, so beware where you play!
Zombies, Run can provide tremendous motivation for those who aren’t normally keen on running, as the story can get quite immersive and will convince you that you simply must run for the good of your township!
This is one of the very few apps doing exercise gamification right. If you like the concept, make sure to check out other workout games from Six to Start, the team behind Zombies, Run.
17. Get Pregnant (Or Avoid It) With Glow
Whether you’re looking to get preggo or avoid it at all costs, Glow is a great companion app for any woman who wants to better understand her body.
Glow tracks your fertility with daily questions regarding your mood, basil body temperature, medication usage, and more. The more info you give Glow, the more accurate it becomes, predicting your fertility window and periods with impressive accuracy.
Even if you’re just looking to understand your body a bit better, Glow is great at helping you become a little more self-aware and understand the incredible machine that is the female body.
Glow also features a fairly active and interesting online community of fellow women sharing the trials and tribulations of femininity!
18. Optimize Your Life With IFTTT
Save valuable time in the new year by optimizing as many aspects of your life as possible! IFTTT (which stands for If This Than That) is a service composed of various “applets” than connect different aspects of your digital life.
You can get the daily weather forecast sent to your phone at 8am every morning, have your Instagram posts automatically tweeted out as Twitter images, turn off your phone’s sound automatically when you enter the office, and much more with the connectivity provided by IFTTT.
With thousands of cool combinations, you may be surprised at just how much time you can save by connecting the various pieces of tech in your life and having them work together.
19. Go To More Concerts With Songkick
“See more live music” is always a resolution on my list for the coming new year, but remembering to check various concert venues on a regular basis can be tough.
Songkick lends a hand by tracking your favorite artists and telling you when and where they’ll be performing. Get notifications when your beloved bands are in town to catch shows you’ll spend the rest of the year remembering fondly!
20. Travel More With Hopper
Hopper makes it easy to travel more by helping you hunt for the very best flight deals. Select your destination and Hopper will show you the best times to travel.
Hopper will even track your tentative flight plans and will notify you if a cheaper flight comes up – or when you need to buy your ticket ASAP before the flights jump in price.
21. Sleep Better With Sleep Cycle
Getting a good night’s sleep is essential for a long and happy life – many of us aspire to be more well-rested in 2017!
Sleep Cycle helps you sleep better and wake up happier. This sleepy-time app analyzes your sleeping patterns and will wake you up within 15-20 minutes of your designated alarm time, during a period when you’re not in deep sleep, making the wakeup process easier on your body to leave you bright eyed and bushy tailed!
22. Expand Your Vocabulary With Dictionary.com
Dictionary.com is a long-time favorite app of mine, especially when it comes to the aspiration of expanding vocabulary.
Dictionary.com’s app has a handy Word of the Day widget that introduces you to a new phrase each day, which will have you boasting impressive verbiage in no time.
Do you have any favorite apps to help with new year’s resolutions that we missed? Share your top picks in the comments!