Apps for productivity... and happiness? breathing/meditation?

A whole new world of tools that have become available through smartphones - whether they're all useful or not is another story! What are your thoughts?

 

"Apparently, if you wonder whether monitoring your happiness might lead to some sense of anxiety or inadequacy about not being happy enough, you are fumbling the optimism for which Happify trains. (A “Cope Better with Stress” notification: “You have 1 day left to earn gold in part 1.”) “By no means do we want you to get obsessed,” Leidner said. “What happens is you develop these habits to become more aware, to become more grateful, to really focus about what drives you—and meaning.” Whatever that means. As long as you’re happy."

From New Yorker

You'll find Happify here


Breathing/Meditation apps, e.g. Stop, Breathe & Think


And then there's more traditional tasks, for example, productivity. However, whereas before these were focused on business or personal users with good income, now you can find fantastic apps such as the latest, Asana (it's well worth a look if you're interested in something like this - PC Mag has a review here). Designed with both personal and business users in mind, this is the sort of BYOA (Bring Your Own App*)that is a threat to traditional IT in industry. Use it at home, realise the quality and start to integrate into a team at work. I suppose this is no different to people setting up their own servers, etc in the early 2000's to provide file-sharing solutions, etc. But so long as people are using the best tool for the job, that's all that matters (if you want a great talk on this topic, try out A16z's podcast here)

 

Any other excellent apps you've come across, or other unusual apps that you'd recommend even just trying out to see what is possible? Much like my post on Virtual Reality, I'm an avid believer in trying out new ideas to see their possibilities. Are you?

 

*BYOA is just as much as a game-changer as BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).

Neal McQuaid