Summary
As anyone who’s ever attempted to build new habits can tell you, it can be difficult to find the time and energy to make them stick. Especially if you’re working, are still a student, are balancing family and friends, or maybe all three, keeping up new habits can seem tedious at best.
Luckily, because so many people have found themselves struggling with the same thing, there are a few options available to alleviate that tedium. A lot of apps have been created to make day-to-day tasks more fun! These apps gamify various aspects of physical, mental, and environmental health, providing rewards and storylines to incentivize work.
11Fortune City—A Finance App
To Help You Make A Budget And Stick To It
Fourdesire’s Fortune Cityis designed to help better manage your finances. It encourages tracking income and expenses to help you understand the way you manage money. You can also easily track various trends in your behavior, set goals, and create both long and short-term budgets.
Of course, all that could be accomplished in a banking app, so what Fortune City adds is the ability to build a city and collect citizens while doing it. The more you use the app, the more prosperous this city will become, and building the best city with the happiest citizens gives a competitive edge to those who need more than just fun aesthetics!
10Sleep Town
To Help You Get Regular Sleep
Sleep Townis designed by ShaoKan Pi to help regulate sleep schedules,like the Pokemon sleep-themed app you might be familiar with. Every night, you can turn on the app, and, if you hit your sleep goal, it will have built a new building. This reward can then be displayed in your town.
Besides being designed to reward a consistent schedule, the app also only works if the phone is not in use during that time. This incentivizes you to break your nightly doom scroll and get to sleep instead.
9Plant Nanny—Water Tracker
To Help You Stay Hydrated
Fourdesire’s Plant Nannykeeps hydration at the front of your mind. It provides customizable hydration plans, and at different difficulties, too! So, you can start off slow before bringing yourself up to your healthiest possible hydration level.
Why bother? The app doesn’t just track your drinking habits, it uses them to grow an adorable little plant. That, and it provides rewards for consistent use. As you progress, you’ll unlock more plants and even find some mysterious creatures.
8Forest: Focus For Productivity
To Help You Focus On Your Work
Forestis designed by ShaoKan Pi as a creative timer to encourage focus. With both a stopwatch mode and a timer mode, you can curate focus sessions as needed. Each session will grow a new tree for your forest. The incentive for not breaking focus is that the tree will die if the session is broken.
Don’t worry, though! The app allows for other selected apps to be used while the timers are going, in case there are things you need to check while working. If that’s not enough of a reason, the app also seeks to plant up to five real world trees per user growing digital trees.
7Study Bunny: Focus Timer
To Help You Stick To Your Study Goals
Superbyte’s Study Bunnyis for all the students out there looking for incentives to actually study. Another fun timer app, this one centers around a ‘study bunny’ who you can buy clothes and furniture for. The way to do this is to earn coins via study sessions.
What sets this app apart from other timers are the extra tools like the to-do lists, flashcards, and Study Tracker. You can also team up with your friends' bunnies for study sessions, if you convince them to get the app.
6Sweepy: Home Cleaning Schedule
To Help Keep Your Space Clean Daily
Sweepyby Appsent wants to gamify your daily chores. It allows these chores to be tracked by room and priority. You can also synchronize it between devices, dividing chores between members of a joint household.
The game aspect comes from the leader board, which tracks how on top of things your household is. Each chore also makes use of streaks to incentivize daily use. Each time a chore is completed, you’re rewarded by seeing the bar next to the task stay green.
5Fitness RPG: Walking Games
To Help You Get Up And Moving
Fitness RPGby Shikudo Games seeks to gamify getting your steps in. Like other series that have attempted to incorporate reality and gameplay, all of your steps go towards the in-game action. In this app, your team of heroes are trained by completing certain fitness goals, and they can then take on stronger battles and win better prizes. Classic RPG stuff.
Fitness RPG attempts to work on a grander scale than others like it with a map, monsters, skins, equipment, and different currencies. For those who already have a fitness tracker, it even works with a number of third party apps, such as Fitbit and Nike.
4Elevate—Brain Training Games
To Help Your Mind Stay Sharp
Elevate, developed by Jesse Pickard, is dedicated to training your brain and sharpening various cognitive skills. It features unique puzzles and games that focus on things like improving vocabulary, math skills, grammar, and general focus. Plus, since they’re all designed to be fun to play, they shouldn’t feel like work.
You can compete against your own past performances while keeping track of your improvements. Not to mention, everything is personalized to your needs and goals.
3ZRX: Zombies, Run + Marvel Move
To Help Encourage Your Training
Zombies, Runis designed by Six to Start and Naomi Alderman for those who know running can be kind of miserable and need extra help to meet their fitness goals. It provides a fun, interactive story to keep runners literally on their toes. When running, you’ll hear zombie noises encouraging you to speed up, and you’ll be able to pick up various supplies for your base. It’s like beingplunged directly into all your favorite zombie games.
Plus, since this app was first rolled out, there’s been quite a few upgrades. If zombies aren’t your thing, there are now a number of Marvel-based workouts featuring characters like Thor and the Hulk.
2Duolingo
To Help You Learn A New Language
One of the most popular language-learning apps,Duolingo,created by Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker, has mastered gamifying learning. Besides using streaks to motivate you, the app breaks lessons down into bite-sized exercises. Each leaderboard is broken up into leagues, and you’re able to move up and down depending on how many points you earn.
You also get rewarded with chests for achieving daily goals, and you can earn bonuses for doing various challenges. For those extra committed fans out there, Duolingo also has coursesfeaturing a few fantasy languagesin its ever-expanding roster of languages.
