Apps I Fell in Love With in 2020
By: Irtiza Hafiz
Tags: iPhone, Apps, Apple, Personal Development, Productivity

Photo by Vista Wei on Unsplash

At the beginning of 2020, I set myself a goal to use my phone more mindfully. The goal was the result of analyzing my screen time and how that is divided between all the apps that I had installed.

Turned out I was suffering from the “infinite scroll syndrome” like most people in today’s world. I was logging two to three hours on apps like Facebook, Instagram and Google News even though I cannot recall much value that I got out of them.

It seemed like instead of using my phone as a tool to get things done, I was the tool being used by my phone.

Since then, I have gone through some form of digital cleansing. Every time I downloaded a new app, I made a note of the value it was meant to provide and through weekly revision I made sure I was getting that value. Otherwise, the app did not deserve a place on my phone.

More importantly, the only apps that I kept in my home screen (easily accessible) were ones related to some kind of productivity work — so calendars, task managers and news apps. All other apps went straight to my App library (iOS 14). Out of sight, out of mind.

Now that we are at the end of 2020, this is a good time to reflect on my phone usage. Especially, I want to go through the apps that changed my relationship with my phone this year.

These apps are the reasons why I have finally started using my phone as a tool. I still have a high screen time, but I can confidently say that every one of those minutes was spent on getting productive work done.

TickTick

TickTick is my primary task management app. It’s absolutely awesome!

I have literally tried all productivity apps out there — Notion, Todoist, Things 3, Bear, Apple Reminders, and many more. Don’t get me wrong, all those are amazing apps but they either try to do too much at once or does too little.

In TickTick I found the only app that strikes a fine balance between features and ease of us. Hands down, the best feature TickTick has is the Calendar feature. You can use it to actually schedule all your tasks, giving every task a time and location to live and breathe in the real world. You can also have two way syncing with your Apple and Google calendars. I have never seen such an awesome feature!

I use TickTick for literally everything! From project planning to day to day errands, everything gets scheduled and completed in this app. It has a bunch of integration with other apps, like Trello and Spark, and super convenient keyboard shortcuts and browser extensions to drop things in your inbox the moment something comes to your mind.

I absolutely loved this app! Would highly recommend it to anyone.

Streaks

Streaks is my habit tracking app of choice. I have tried other apps like Habitify and Habitica before, but none of them worked for me.

Streaks is one of the most beautifully designed app I have come across. It is super straightforward to log your habits.

The app helped me a ton to develop some good habits and get rid of some bad habits in what has been a challenging year for all of us. It also has a beautiful and information rich iOS 14 widget for folks who love widgets!

You will also find all kinds of analytics if you are into numbers. You can find the times when you usually do a particular habit or even days of week when you tend to do something more than something else.

The app has done a great job in reminding me to establish good habits and stay away from bad habits. I would highly recommend this app to anyone who is trying to develop good habits in their lives.

Truebill

As a person I have always been financially ignorant. I never paid much attention to how I was spending my hard earned money.

In college, I used to have a part time job of minimum wage. I never knew when and how my balance was reaching $0. Once I graduated and started a full time job, the trend continued as I never paid much attention to my finances. It wasn’t reaching $0 like it was in college, but I was burning through most of what I earned on a weekly basis.

Also, living in a world of subscriptions did not help. Nowadays it seems like everything in the internet is a subscription. The only thing you don’t have to pay for every month seems to be the air you breathe in!

This is where Truebill comes in. The app does an amazing job of automatically categorizing and tracking your spendings once you link your bank accounts. You can easily set weekly and monthly budgets. They automatically generate reports of your spending patterns and if you are in track to meet your budget goals. All these with almost zero effort!

When it comes to subscriptions, the app does wonders. Once you connect all your bank accounts, it automatically figures out all the subscriptions you have. It tells you the dates you pay these subscription fees. And most importantly, if you want to unsubscribe to any, they do it for you!! So not only will the app help you find all the unnecessary subscriptions, they will also help you cancel them. That’s free money right there!

I have tried a couple other finance apps like Mint and Clarity Money, but personally Truebill gave me the most value for my money. Linking accounts is also very straightforward and you can also monitor your credit score.

So it has been an all-in-one finance app for me. It helped me save $$$$ and I would highly recommend y’all to give it a shot.

Medium

Medium is my only platform to consume informative articles written about a range of topics. If you are reading this, I am pretty sure you are already familiar with Medium.

In my experience, Medium has a super clean reading experience. There are no Ads. The recommendation engine is very good. It always recommends me stories that are pertinent to my interests.

The highlight features is also pretty cool! Every Sunday when I am doing my weekly roundup, I can go through the highlights section and archive the snippets that I want to hold on to.

Medium also has an amazing way to find new awesome writers! They send out a daily digest with articles from your interested topics. The stories distributed are from writers all over Medium, not only the people you follow. This helps me discover some amazing writers.

Overall, the content quality is really high and I always pick up something new whenever I use Medium.

Apple News

I have been a lifelong Android user. Naturally, my default news app of choice, as a result, was Google News.

Even though Google News did an amazing job of keeping me updated with news from around the world, it had two big problems:

News feed like home feed, prone to the “infinite scroll syndrome”

Content from sources that had click baits titles and some of them were plain untrue

Since, moving to Apple News after I got my first iPhone earlier in the year, I have grown to appreciate the importance of “quality” news. Apple News curates articles from reputable sources which means I get a minimum amount of articles that I can actually believe in. It also has good categorization which means I can explore multiple topics that interests me very easily.

However, it’s best feature is the new iOS 14 stacked widgets. You can stack a bunch of the Apple News widgets on top of each other; each widget from a different topic you are interested in. When you want to consume the main headlines from these different topics, you can just flip through them from your home page and get a good idea of everything that’s happening. This makes sure you don’t get into the “infinite scrolling” habit.

All in all, Apple News does an extremely good job of showing me only relevant information in a concise way.

I can confidently recommend all the apps that I mentioned in this article. Each one of these apps had a positive effect on my life this year. And I am sure using these will impact your life similarly.