- Hey, what up guys?
So it is round up time.
Today I'm gonna be sharing 21 different apps
and tools that, more or less,
force you to get your work done.
Now to be honest right up front none of these apps
work quite like that creepy piano in the movie Coraline.
None of them are gonna make your computer sprout robotic
arms that grab your hands and literally
make them start typing.
But what they do provide are what I like to call
training wheels for the brain because as I'm sure
you're well aware left to its own devices
your brain is liable to get distracted by cat videos
instead of actually doing the work
that you have set out to do.
Now over time and with practice you can build
your self-discipline and your ability to focus.
But while you're going through the early stages
of that process it's useful to use systems
that provide training wheels, be they in the form
of helpful limitations, commitment devices,
feedback in reports or literal drill instructors
with very little regard for the integrity of your eardrum.
So each of the apps that I'm gonna share with you today
fits into each one of those categories,
except the last one.
And in fairness I did go do a search on Fiverr
for affordable drill instructors
but that turned up no results.
So you're on your own if you want to find
your own personal Major Payne.
But before you go looking for one let's go
through these apps starting with those
that fall into the category of commitment devices.
What exactly is a commitment device?
Well to put things simply it's anything that creates
a consequence for failing to do the thing
that you've set up to do.
All the tools in this category aim
to make it painful not to do your work
and there are quite a few of these.
Let's start with my favorite one which is Beeminder.
It is no exaggeration to say that Beminder is one
of the primary reasons why I have a successful
YouTube channel today because back when I started
on YouTube I used it to commit to publishing
a new video every single week.
Essentially Beeminder allows you to commit to a goal
either of doing more of something or less of something
and allows you to put money on the line.
Moreover, it's very nerdy and it's all
about tracking data so you can hook it up to tons
of different tools including Apple Health, Strava,
Todoist and IFTTT, which stands for if this, then that,
which basically allows you to hook it up
to pretty much any service on the planet.
And due to the presence of all those integrations
the only real limitation here is your imagination.
And there are tons of different goals that you can
start putting money on in order to make sure
that you are more committed to them in the future.
But to give you one idea, again, for three entire
years I tracked my blog's RSS feed and made sure
that I published a new blog post, a new podcast episode,
and a new YouTube video every single week.
And I had money on the line so I made sure that I did it.
Now in the same vein there's another website
called stickK, which is spelled S-T-I-C-K-K
and it's very similar to Beeminder
though it's a little less nerdy.
As with Beeminder you commit to a goal
and then you create stakes or consequences
in case you fail.
And you can actually put money on the line
though it has fewer charts and graphs
and it's generally a little bit less
statistics-heavy than Beeminder is.
But on the other hand you can set supporters
who can watch your progress and a referee
who can email every single time you log progress
and make sure that you were telling the truth.
Moving on from there we have an app with a much more
specific purpose called The Most Dangerous Writing App.
If you, like me, sometimes have trouble getting started
writing or while you're writing you have trouble
with your inner critic silencing you
or trying to edit things when you should
just be getting thoughts out of your head
then this is an app that you might want to use
because once you start a session with either a time goal
or a word count goal you have to keep typing.
And if you stop typing for long enough
it completely deletes your work.
Not only that but it also has a hardcore mode.
If you check this box and start a session
you aren't gonna be able to see anything on the screen
except for the last letter that you typed
because when you type letters they flash on screen
but everything else is blurred.
And this, once again, silences that inner critic,
makes you just get things out of your head and edit later.
Alright so now let's talk about the Strides app
and the reason I put this on this list
isn't because it forces you to work by putting money
on the line on anything like that but it does
take advantage of what's been called the Seinfeld Strategy.
The comedian Jerry Seinfeld is famous for having honed
his joke writing talent by making sure he wrote
a new joke every single day.
To track his progress he would mark it
off on a calendar on his wall.
And because he could see that calendar he didn't
want to break the streak.
He had this visual reminder of his progress
that he didn't want to tarnish.
So this don't break the streak strategy can be
very powerful because we humans like to be consistent
in our behavior and we don't want
to see those chains broken.
Now while you could definitely use a calendar
on your wall to do this that's not an app
so it doesn't belong on this list.
And while you could use any habit tracking app
in the world to do it as well because almost all
of them show your streak I do want to give
a specific shout out to the Strides app because in
that particular app, when you're creating a goal,
you have the option to create a goal for your streaks.
So instead of just watching it count up to infinity
you can actually set a 30, or 60, or 90-day
streak goal which means your 30-day challenges
can become that much more official.
Next up we've got coach.me which used to be called
Lift back when I started using it as a college student
but now it's called coach.me because it has a big focus on,
you guessed it, coaching.
Now coach.me does have a habit tracking app
that's very similar to a lot of others out there
but what I want to highlight in this video
is their coaching services because if you were one
of the people who listened to the intro
of this video and did want your own personal Major Payne,
wanted your own personal drill instructor,
this is probably the closest that you're going to get
for not a whole lot of money because they've got personal
coaching services for building new habits
and staying productive for about 15 bucks a week,
a lot more expensive than everything else on this list
but if you do want personalized coaching and you don't have
a friend who can be an accountability partner
this could be an option.
Of course another option could be to use the entire
internet as your accountability partner
which is what I've done by essentially
rolling my own commitment device using Google Sheets.
So a couple years ago I set a goal for myself
to read 25 pages of non-fiction every single day
for three months without fail.
And while I did have an accountability partner
in real life I also wanted to make my goal public
and I wanted people to be able
to track my progress over time.
So I created a public facing Google spreadsheet
which tracked the book I was reading
and how many pages I read every single day
and then I made it public on my website
so people could call me out if I failed to read.
And the last tool that I'm gonna mention
here in the commitment devices section is something
that you might not have expected.
I'm gonna mention Discord and
or Skype as a commitment device.
Now for those of you who don't know Discord
is an app that is primarily used by gamers
to chat with either by voice or by text
and it's a very cool app.
In fact we have a college info geek official Discord
which you can find in the description down below.
But I'm going to suggest using the voice chat
feature here to set up what I like to call a work group.
Back when I was in college I set up one of these
with a couple of blogger friends
who each lived in different states.
And every once in a while we would get on Skype,
we'd be on a call but we wouldn't talk to each other.
We would simply be on the call and be working
and this was in order to simulate the experience
of sitting in a room with study buddies
or accountability partners getting work done
and just getting the motivation from knowing the other
people were also getting their work done.
So even though I wasn't physically in the room
with my blogger friends I knew that on the other line
of that Skype call, even if it was silent,
was somebody who was getting work done.
And that made me more motivated to do my work, as well.
Category number two on my list are the apps
that provide what I like to call helpful limitations,
or to put it another way, apps that block you
from doing specific things.
And a lot of the apps on this list are going
to be website and application blockers.
And I did talk a lot about those in my internet
distractions video so I do recommend going
and watching that for some more in-depth
tips regarding those but here I'm just going
to recommend them if you haven't heard about them.
And the first one I have to talk about is my absolute
favorite website blocker in the world which is Freedom.
Now there are lots of other apps out there
but Freedom is the only one that works on all
the platforms that I use and reliably blocks
everything that is a potential distraction
for me on a daily basis.
Now while Freedom is, by far, the most convenient
of the website blocking apps because it allows you
to define all of your blocks in schedules
from a universal dashboard that goes out to all
of your different devices it does have a monthly cost
so if you want to pay less money
and maybe have a little more inconvenience
then the following apps could be good substitutes.
First up, if you're on a Mac you're gonna want
to get the app SelfControl which is free and for Mac only.
And if you're on Windows you're gonna want to go
for FocalFilter which is, again,
free and it is Windows exclusive.
On the iPhone there's an app called
Block Distracting Websites for about three bucks
though near the end of this video I'm gonna talk
about a new feature in iOS that may supersede this app
and make it obsolete so stick around for that.
And for those of you on Android there's a free app
called Block Site that does the same thing.
There is also an app for Android, iOS and Chrome
called Forest which is not really a website blocker
but can kind of function in the same manner.
Forest helps you avoid using your phone in distracting
ways by allowing you to grow a tree as long
as you don't exit the app.
If you do, though, you kill the tree.
Same with the Chrome extension, if you go to any
of the sites on yours on your black list you're going
to kill that tree that you could have grown
had you just stayed away from them during that time.
And, of course, over time you get to see your progress
in the form of a virtual forest growing up
on your phone or in your browser.
And if you want to keep that forest nice and healthy
then you are not going to be distracting yourself.
And in a similar vein to forest I'm going to mention
literally any Pomodoro app.
Now I debated whether or not to put Pomodoro apps
on this list because they really don't explicitly
do anything to force you to do your work
but I just had to add them because they're
so effective for me.
Once I start a Pomodoro session and I have committed
to doing one single thing I am so much less likely
to go do anything else but that one task.
And if you want a recommendation my absolute favorite
Pomodoro app is one called Tide which is
on the iPhone and Android and I like
to actually put it on my phone screen,
put the phone screen on the desk and leave the screen
on during those Pomodoro sessions that way I can
actually see the timer the whole time.
Rounding out our section on helpful limitations
are a couple of apps that help you write more effectively
starting with Cold Turkey writer which essentially
locks your computer down completely until you've hit
a writing goal of either word count or minutes written.
It's very much like The Most Dangerous Writing App
but instead of deleting your work it just doesn't let you
do anything until you've actually done that work.
Along side that is another writing app called Blurt
which isn't so sadistic as The Most Dangerous Writing App
or Cold Turkey writer, it won't lock down your computer,
it won't delete your writing but it does have that
feature which blurs every line except for the one
you're currently working on which can, again,
help to silence that inner critic
and help you actually keep writing.
That brings us to our final category in this video
which I like to call feedback and reports.
None of the apps here force you to do anything actively,
they don't make you put money on the line,
they don't block sites but they do show you,
in naked embarrassing detail,
what you've been doing with your time.
And the first one that I'm going to list here
is one called Toggl which is an active time tracker
where you actually have to start a clock and tell it
what you're going to be doing during that time.
Now as with Pomodoro apps I find that using manual
time tracking apps makes me more likely to do the thing
I set out to do because I set a timer and I've intentionally
started that process.
But this also lets you take advantage of what's been
called the Hawthorne effect which describes
how people tend to change their behavior for the better
when they know that they're being observed or tracked.
And in my experience with manual time tracking
I found that this tends to happen even if you're the one
doing the observations of your own behavior.
Now if you happen to find that Toggl is not the
time tracking app for you don't worry
because there are dozens of other ones out there.
And I do want to give an honorable mention to one
called Clockify which is completely free.
Now Toggl's personal features are also free
so they're pretty comparable for anybody wanting
to use them on a strictly personal basis
but any of you guys out there managing teams
you might want to give Clockify a look.
Now both of those apps are built
around manual time tracking.
We are now going to move over to automatic time tracking
with apps like RescueTime.
As you may have gathered from the previous sentence
RescueTime, and other apps like it, automatically
tracks the time you spend on different websites
and applications, categorizes that time
as productive or non-productive and then gives you
reports on how you've been spending your time.
And these reports can be very eye opening
because you may think you know how you spend your time
but how you think you spend your time is probably
very different than how you actually spend your time
and it could be pretty surprising to see just how much time
you waste watching cat videos and not actually
getting your work done.
Now along side RescueTime and apps like Timing,
and Hours and other things that are very similar
there's another app I want to mention called
Y-Productive and I'm adding this to the list
because it does what RescueTime does but it also allows
you to create daily project and task lists.
So it kind of combines multiple productivity
features into one.
And finally, before I tell you the apps on this list
that I use personally, the last item that we have
to talk about is something called Screen Time
which is a built-in feature in iOS 12.
So if you're using an iPhone you might not need
an automatic time tracker or a website blocker
because this thing can do both of those things.
It'll tell you where you're spending your time
on your phone, how many hours and you can also set up
number one, apps that are gonna be blocked
and also something called downtime hours
which are specific hours where you can't access
any apps whatsoever except for ones
that you put on a specific whitelist.
So that brings us to a question that I'm sure that many
of you are likely to have which is out of all the apps
on this list which are the ones that I use
on a daily basis myself.
But for those of you who are wondering
those apps include Beeminder which I mentioned
in the beginning of this video as one
of my favorite apps and one of the things
that let me build this YouTube channel in the first place.
Additionally I also use Strides which is the habit tracker
that I'm currently using and very much enjoying.
The Tide app which is my Pomodoro tracker of choice,
Freedom to block distracting website on my computer
and my phone and RescueTime so I can get those reports
and see just how much time I'm wasting on a daily basis
and hopefully to reduce that in the future.
Of course there are many other apps that I use
to get things done, many productivity apps
that don't quite fall into the category
of things that force me to get my work done
but that do build systems or allow me to do things
much more efficiently.
And one of the apps that you guys been asking me
a lot about in the recent past is one called Notion
which I use for many different things including
managing these video projects.
Now Notion is incredibly flexible and powerful.
It's done a lot to improve my workflows
and it could potentially be a very useful tool for you,
possibly even a note-taking system of choice.
But a lot of you guys have told me that Notion is also
very complicated and you don't quite know where to start.
So if you find yourself in that camp or you want to learn
how to set up a very efficient workflow, really, really
quickly, I'm gonna recommend that you take my friend
Francesco's Notion course over on Skillshare.
Francesco is an absolute expert when it comes
to productivity apps and this course is a great resource
for figuring out how to get the most out of Notion.
Of course while you're on Skillshare you might also want
to take my friend Mike Vardy's course on time theming
if you want to become even productive.
And that's a skill that'll help you no matter
what apps you're using on a daily basis.
And in case you don't know Skillshare is also
an amazing resource for learning new skills
across a ton of different disciplines
because they've got over 22,000 courses
and topics ranging from business to marketing
to story telling to digital animation,
to even music production.
What's more Skillshare is incredibly affordable
with a premium subscription costing less
than 10 bucks a month.
And even better if you click the link
in the description down below you can get a two month
free trial with unlimited learning on the platform.
You can learn a lot in two months.
So if you want to start learning some new skills
or increasing your productivity or digging into Notion
or any of the other app tutorials on the platform
and you want to support this channel then click the link
in the description down below and sign up.
Big thanks to Skillshare for sponsoring this video
and being a huge supporter of this channel
and as always thank you so much for watching.
Hopefully you found this video helpful.
Hopefully it pointed you to something new that could help
you become more productive on a daily basis.
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Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one.