A new year brings a new chance to improve your
life. Here are seven ways to upgrade your 2017 with tech!
Research has shown that keeping a journal
can reduce
stress and increase productivity. Writing about your troubles
can help you sort out your feelings while writing about your
goals can help
you focus on a positive future. A digital journal lives on your
smartphone and lets you write anywhere you go, plus it can be
secured with a password.
We
recommend:
Cybercrime is on the rise, and if you reuse your password, all
you need is one account to be hacked and the attacker can use it to
get into your other accounts. Use
a password manager, it’ll help you to generate random passwords
for each account and save them for you. All you need to remember is
a single master password to unlock them.
We
recommend:
Productivity guru David Allen, creator of the Getting
Things Done (GTD) system, is a big advocate of writing all your
tasks down in a ‘trusted system.’ Not
only can a to-do app make you more productive, it can also help
you relax when you know for sure that you’ve missed nothing
urgent.
We
recommend:
Podcasts are a great way to learn, and some of them can
even be as entertaining as they are educational. You can use the
Podcasts app which ships with iOS, or try third-party apps
like Overcast (iOS)
and Pocket
Casts (iOS and Android). There’s a universal of free
podcasts out there to listen to, some good, some bad.
We
recommend:
When it comes to keeping control of your weight,
nothing makes a difference like a reality check. A smart digital
scale can help you measure your weight, and sync a record of it to
apps and services (our
colleague used one to lose 15kg over 6 months). The fancier
ones can even measure BMI, heart rate and fat percentage. While
accuracy may vary, the important thing is to track trends over
time.
We
recommend:
HardwareZone writers are usually the default IT
helpdesk for most of our friends and families, and it still
horrifies us how few people back up their work, then lose
everything when something goes south. External hard disks are
relatively cheap, so get one, plug it in, and use these backup apps
today.
We
recommend:
Research has shown that our constant need for a quick
social media hit decreases our ability to focus, and can make us
feel more stress than pleasure. Try unplugging from social media,
and even the entire internet, for a day a week, to be completely
present in the real world.
We
recommend:
A version of
this article first appeared in the January 2017 issue
of HWM.
