You Can Become a Productive Person - Alarmy, Momentum, Todoist and Toggl

[This post was inspired by CGP Grey and Myke on Cortex 44 Existential Time Tracking and Thomas Frank’s “How to Wake Up Early and Make it a Habit - College Info Geek”]

There are very few apps that can completely change your life. But Toggl, Momenum, Alarmy and Todoist are four that can. I know because they’ve changed mine. I’ve gone from a person who wanted to be productive to someone who actually is. And I feel productive, which is in some ways more valuable than being productive. Feeling productive gives me confidence and the clearness of mind to be in control of my life. So, here they are, the four apps that can change your life. . .




Alarmy (iOS/Android, free and paid versions) - Let’s start with Alarmy because that’s how I start my day. Alarmy is the sort of alarm clock that will make you get out of bed. The way I use it, I have it ask me to take a picture of a preset object to shut it off. This way, I have to get out of bed, and by the time I’m out of bed, I rarely feel like going back. This might not work for everyone, but I’ve been a chronic over-sleeper all my life, so it should work for most people. (You can also have it ask you math questions or shake your phone to shut off the alarm.)



Momentum (iOS/Mac, $4.99 to unlock premium version, which I did) -Momentum is a habit tracker. It’s very minimalist and works well on Mac, iPhone and Apple Watch. It allows you to create a sort of to-do list that repeats every day. Before Momentum, I did this in Notes on my iPhone, but it was getting annoying to check/uncheck habits every day and not be able to see my history. On Momentum I have everything from “write” to “make bed” to “check Instagram only 2x a day”, basically all the things I want to turn into habits.



Todoist (almost every platform, great free version) - Todoist is probably the most well-known service on my list. I didn’t pay for the premium version, and it’s been working perfectly for me. On it I have only two lists: my Master To-Do List (which lives in the Inbox) and my Goals list (which exists as its own project). (See the absolutely life-changing book Getting Things Done by David Allen for everything you need to know about to-do lists.) Todoist keeps my head clear. I know that at any given moment everything I need to get done in my life is sitting in a clearly-defined list of clearly-defined tasks. Keeping a good to-do list is the key to mental freedom.



Toggl (almost every platform, great free version) - Toggl is a time-tracking service that makes it easy to keep tabs on how you spend your time. There are so many different ways you can use Toggl, but basically, you’ll have some list of “projects” under which you’ll track individual tasks. So, say you have a project called “work”. Every time you do something to do with “work” you’ll start work timer and enter the name of the task you’re tracking, like, “answering emails”. The iOS and Mac apps aren’t great, and to make most changes you have to go to the website, but those issues are far outweighed by the value that Toggl can bring to your life. In fact, Toggl is probably the most valuable app in this list, in terms of helping you become productive. It has given me a top-down, objective view of my life and showed me what areas of my life need fine-tuning and which areas are detrimental to my productivity. Podcasts, for example, have been a major source of entertainment and information to me for a long time now, but it’s only after I began time-tracking that I realized that the amount of value I got out of them compared to how much time I spent on them wasn’t as high as I’d thought it was. So I’ve switched to focusing on learning web development instead.

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