12 Apps To Become Smarter – Faster!
If you’re like me, you probably spend way to much time on your phone.
Like most people, I used to use my phone as an entertainment, distraction device. I used to lose several hours a day, doing useless and meaningless things. And honestly I felt bad about it, I felt unproductive, and I felt like I was losing my time. A time I could use to do so many more things.
But then I realized that this very device that made me lose so much of my time, could actually be an incredible tool, to boost my mental health, focus AND productivity! Yep, all of that! All I needed is (a little) self-discipline, and the right apps to download. It took me time to find them and try them out but I can say that I use those 12 on a daily basis and they are really helping me reach my goals!
SO, here are my 12 MUST-HAVES that I highly encourage you to download. I’ve divided them into categories, so you can sort out according to the goal you’re trying to reach – whether is productivity, focus or mental health.
12 Apps To Become Smarter – Faster!
Apps to learn new things
TED
This one I guess doesn’t need an intro. You guys all know TED conferences. What I like about the app is that it gathers all the videos from their YouTube channel. So basically you just need to open the TED app and scroll through their last videos, without having the distraction from other YouTube videos (you know like that time when you wanted to watch something interesting and ended up watching the stupidest thing ever?)
Price: Free
Blinkist
Okay so here’s one of my favorite apps. Blinkist is allowing you to read or listen in 15 minutes the best insights from over 3000+ bestselling nonfiction books! From Psychology to Management & Leadership to Personal Growth & Self-Improvement to Mindfulness & Happiness to Communication Skills… You’ll necessarily find your area of interest! Blinkist allows you to read all the insights from the books you’ve been trying to read for so long! You don’t have access to the entire book but to the main ideas, which is awesome because you’ll save so much time!
Price: Freemium model. The paid version is $80/year with unlimited access to every book.
Duolinguo
This one is, to me, the best app to learn a language. Some will prefer Babble, but I’m definitely a Duolinguo fan. You can learn German, Chinese, Russian, French, Italian… Actually, any existing language can be learned on Duolinguo. The app is very user-friendly and the progress is crazy if you use it only 15 minutes a day. You can start as a complete beginner or you can use the app to perfect your skills.
Price: Freemium model. The paid version is $4,99/month with unlimited access to the app.
Coursera
Coursera is the app for online learning. You can choose from 2600+ courses in 11+ topics and learn on the go. This app helps you advance your career, get your dream job, master new skills or just explore new hobbies. Categories go from Data Science to Computer Science to Personal Development to Arts and Humanities and so on.
Price: Free access to the courses. The paid version unlocks quizzes and projects that test your skills and award you with a Certificate and the price varies according to the course chosen.
12 Apps To Become Smarter – Faster!
Apps to improve focus & mental health
Calm
Learning new things is really important but your brain needs rest as well. Most of the leaders in this world are using the benefits of meditation. Among others, it improves focus, fights diseases, helps losing weight, improves sleep quality and brain capacity, but also helps become happier, more conscious and appreciate life more. If you’re doing a stressful job or if you have a lot of responsibility or anxiety in your daily life, breathing and meditating, even only 5 minutes a day, can totally change your life quality. Calm is a good meditation app because you have access for free to a lot of sessions. Every time you use it you also see quotes on mindfulness and happiness from meditation masters that can inspire you!
Price: Freemium model. The paid version is $50/year and unlocks all the blocked content!
Read more tips on improving your life quality on The Light Of Yoga!
Sleep cycle
When trying to improve your life quality, sleep is literally one of the main concern you need to have. Sleep cycle is an app that monitors your sleep and helps you improve its quality. You can understand the different phases you go through during your sleep and understand what can improve or lower your sleep quality score. The app can be used as an alarm as well and wakes you up at the best time according to your sleep phases.
Price: The free version is already a very complete tool.
Brain.fm
Brain.fm provides music designed for the brain to improve focus, relaxation, naps & sleep within 15 minutes of use. If you’re trying to work for instance but cannot manage to be truly focused or productive, this app can really help. Or if you work in a noisy environment. Use it with your headphones and you’ll see the difference that it makes, it’s almost magic!!
Price: Again, the free version is enough to unlock much of the content.
Be Focused
Be Focused is an app that helps you track your focus time. It’s really helpful when you know you have to be focused to get things done. Be focused let you get those things done by breaking up individual tasks among discrete intervals, separated by short breaks. You can also use the app to manage your tasks, track your progress throughout the day and so on. You can customize the settings according to your work preferences (work interval duration, short break duration…). This app is highly efficient in maximizing your productivity!
Price: The app is free and the pro version only removes the ads so I don’t recommend it necessarily.
12 Apps To Become Smarter – Faster!
Other Apps – & Super Helpful
Evernote
Stop taking notes on your iPhone app and download Evernote. Indeed, with Evernote, you can input typed notes or scan handwritten notes. You can also add your to-do’s, photos, images, webpages, audio. And the real value-added compared to the iPhone notes is that you can organize notes any way you want, everything is instantly searchable and synchronized across all your devices. Don’t ever doubt – put il all in Evernote.
Price: Freemium model. The paid version is $69.99 per year to unlock all the
Genius scan
This one is an app you need to have on your phone because it makes your life easier! Basically, every time you got an invoice or an important paper, just scan it with Genius scan and you’ll have the scanned version directly on your phone. That way every time you need this particular important paper, you know that you don’t need to go through all your papers probably lost somewhere but just need to go to this app! “Genius” right?
Price: Free
LastPass
Again, that’s an app that can really save your life. The idea is easy it’s just putting all your password in one place, so that when you forget one of your passwords you can just look into this app. You only have one password to remember once you have LastPass –> The password to enter the app! Trust me it’s so helpful!
Price: Free
coach.me
The last app I’m going to talk about is really really IMPORTANT. You guys all need to download and use this one. All the apps I’ve talked about in this article is going to change some of your habits, maybe you’ll add new habits like “15 minutes of Duolingo a day” or “1 blinkist per week”. And when you have new habits, if you want to be consistent, track your progress is really really a must do. Otherwise, you just forget and quit all those great habits you’ve created. Coach.me is the app that is going to help you track all of that.
Price: Freemium – I believe the free version is already enough to enjoy the benefits of the app.
Talking about habits and how good it can do to your life, I recommend you to read this article, talking about the power of those habits.
Thanks for reading 12 Apps To Become Smarter – Faster! Don’t hesitate reading my other article on sustainability here.