New Year’s resolutions… Millions of us make them every year, but how often do we actually follow through on them? How many times has that gym membership card ended up in the back of a drawer? How long until that detailed budget spreadsheet gets shoved into a folder on your computer, never to be looked at again?
Hey, we’re not judging you. We’ve done it too—more than we’d like to admit. After all, change is hard. But we’ve found that utilizing the right tools can often make a big difference in whether or not you actually meet those goals you set for yourself this year. So here are 3 of the most common New Year’s resolutions, and the apps that can help you meet them.
Health and Fitness
The vast majority of people make some sort of resolution related to their health and fitness: lose weight, get in shape, be more active, eat healthier, etc. These are huge lifestyle changes, and it can be difficult to know where to start. Our recommendation is that you download the My Fitness Pal app for your smartphone.
This app has both free and premium versions, so you can get all the features that you want. But in the free version alone, you can track everything you eat, insert ingredients to get nutrition facts for your favorite recipes, and input your exercise. The app will track not only your calorie intake, but your intake of other nutrients as well. And with regular weigh-in reminders, it is designed to keep you on track to whatever your fitness goals may be.
Budgeting
Is your resolution to get on and stick to a budget? An Excel spreadsheet might seem like a decent idea at first, but remembering to keep receipts and enter them into your computer every day is difficult to do. If you want to create a budgeting habit that will stick, then you need to make it easy on yourself. We recommend using the You Need a Budget app (or YNAB, as it prefers to be called).
YNAB does come with a cost, but the features it offers make it worth it. First of all, having your budgeting tool with you wherever you go makes staying on track a lot easier. You can immediately enter expenses instead of trying to remember to do it later. YNAB also offers customizable budget categories and allows you to balance your budget every month against your bank accounts, ensuring you didn’t miss any expense entries. It will also give you a nice little summary for each month, telling you how you did and how much money you saved. Budgeting is a lot easier with this tool in your pocket.
Getting Organized
The resolution to “get organized” is a pretty vague one, and that just makes it all that much harder. It can apply to every facet of your life, from the home to the office, so making a change to your old habits is extremely difficult. So we recommend starting with one element of your life that adds more clutter than you realize—paper. And of course, we know there’s no better way to organize paper than with eFileCabinet and the eFileCabinet Mobile app.
Think about all of the paper involved in your life: mortgage statements, insurance forms, tax documents, medical records, receipts and warranty paperwork, and even your kids’ report cards and school projects. And that’s just the paperwork you have at home! The office usually has even more paper that you have to deal with.
Wherever the papers are, the eFileCabinet Mobile app lets you organize it quickly and easily. You can take pictures of documents with your smartphone’s camera, and the app will organize the pages into a single PDF, which you can easily store in a relevant cabinet, drawer, and folder. If you have a scanner, you can scan the papers directly into your computer and use the OCR feature to make the document searchable text. Taking those papers to a digital medium makes it easier to organize it all while making it safer and more secure.
So if you’ve set one of the above New Year’s resolutions for yourself, make sure you have the right tools to help you succeed. With these apps, and a little effort and consistency, 2016 will be the year that you meet every goal you’ve set. Good luck, and Happy New Year!