It’s great to see creativity in action, especially when it helps you to find better and brighter ways to do things.
While most people are generally keen to develop professionally, many of us also have a strong commitment to personal growth, meaningful personal pursuits, health and happiness. We want to be the best version of ourselves and sometimes this is just plain overwhelming! Ironically, we can even put pressure on ourselves to relax… “I really must get back into yoga/meditation/running/insert action here”.
To come even close to achieving this, we need a heady mix of organisation, motivation, learning, play and down-time. Here at deliberatepractice, we do enjoy a bit of work, rest and play every day, so have put together a collection of our favourite apps that help us, to share with you:
Learn
Blinkist (https://www.blinkist.com/en/)
The tagline: “A smarter you in 15 minutes”
The pitch: 1,000+ best-selling nonfiction books, transformed into powerful packs you can read in just 15 minutes
Our take: If you love learning, but don’t have the time or energy to plough through endless textbooks, this is the app for you. Blinkist has quite incredibly summarised hundreds of best sellers into snapshots that are very easy to digest. You can read up on juicy topics like motivation, marketing, leadership , productivity, science, current affairs and entrepreneurship, culture, economics…the list goes on. Once you’ve chosen your topic and book, Blinkist breaks it down into chapter summaries, so you can pick and choose what appeals to you most within each book. Wow.
Babbel (https://uk.babbel.com/)
The tagline: “Stay curious and connected”
The pitch: When you can speak another language your world becomes bigger, richer and more inspiring. Learn with Babbel – it’s fun, easy and effective.
Our take: Forget the hassle of getting to a class once a week for months on end, Babbel integrates learning a new languages into everyday life. You set your own pace and learn as you go intuitively, using speech recognition to improve your pronunciation. There are currently 14 languages to learn online, including Russian, Indonesian, Spanish, German, Turkish, Italian or Danish.
Grow
The tagline: “Enjoy becoming better everyday”
The pitch: Peak is brain training redesigned for the mobile you. Improve your cognitive skills and build healthy training habits with fun but challenging games, goals and workouts.
Our take: This is geared towards those who would like to train their brain on the go in quick bites. You can imagine sharpening your brain on the train instead of scrolling through social media sites. There are six daily games to play and you compete against yourself to beat your daily targets, with analytics to track your progress.
Habit List (http://habitlist.com/)
The tagline: “Create good habits. Break unhealthy ones. Build a better you.”
The pitch: Habit List includes everything you need to reach your goals, wrapped in a beautiful and intuitive interface. It motivates you, helps you stay focused, and keeps you on track. It’s for all the little things that make a big difference.
Our take: This is a great app to consolidate all your healthy intensions into one spot that’s always accessible. Anything from taking your vitamins, to drinking water, walking the dog or meditating. Habit list helps you schedule it all in, tracks your progress and motivates you to beat your best.
Relax
Smiling Minds (http://smilingmind.com.au/)
The tagline: “Meditation made easy”
The pitch: A-for-profit initiative based on a process that provides a sense of clarity, calm and contentment.
Our take: People who are calmer do better and feel better. We all know this intellectually, but this app makes it quick, easy and enjoyable. If you haven’t come across this one yet, it has tailored programs for young and old alike, so it’s a great tool for parents to help their kids, or for daily adult relaxation.
Play
Pandora (http://www.pandora.com/)
The tagline: “To play only music you’ll love”
The pitch: Great music discovery is effortless and free with Pandora. Just start with the name of one of your favourite artists, songs, genres or composers and we will do the rest. It’s easy to create personalized stations that play only music you’ll love.
Our take: Choose the type of music you enjoy and go from there to create your own ‘radio stations’ that will only play music you like. This is the lazy man’s playlist. You can quickly and easily create up to 100 unique “stations” based on the types of music you enjoy. Yes please.
People are using their life experience and creativity to create more and more amazing apps every day, so the next challenge is to find exactly what you need amongst the enormity of options available.
We hope this will give you a couple of apps to help in a small way…all you need now is a moment to download them!
Which apps help you to live your best life? This may be the first of many blogs on the topic…we’d love to hear your recommendations!
