MOLLY VANDENBERG
Staff Writer
I don’t want to speak for everyone here, but I think it’s a fair assumption that college students are always looking for better ways to organize their lives. In today’s world, we can look toward things like apps on our phone to help point us in the right direction.
The description on the App Store for “HabitBull” makes it look very promising. Boasting a 4.7 star overall review, it promises to easily help you keep track of your habits, day to day routines and other to-do lists. It can help you build positive habits or break negative ones.
It also seems to offer an endless amount of customizations. It claims it can “measure and track anything and everything,” from bad habits you’re trying to break to positive ones. Wow, sign me up.
Upon first opening the app, it wants you to immediately register with either Facebook or your email address before getting started. After registering, you’re brought to a habit page, where you can add any habits you want to track. The categories are broken down into things like arts, health and fitness, money, self improvement and work and study.
I decided to track my time management and my cleaning habits. I was able to narrow down what I wanted to track to “clean at least one thing in the house everyday.”
After creating a habit to track, the app creates a calendar for you to keep track of how many days you’ve been successful. Like Snapchat, it keeps track of your “daily streak.” It also offers other statistics like how many tries you’ve attempted, percent success and maximum streak. This idea is based on Seinfeld’s production secret of “don’t break the chain.”
I really like how there are discussion boards for each of the habits. For example, creating a house cleaning habit you want to track gives you access to the house cleaning discussion boards. Here people share different kind of tips and tricks they use when it comes to cleaning and organizing the house. I was pleasantly surprised and definitely learned a few things I never knew.
Some of the tools in the app appear a little confusing at first and I think you’d need to track a habit for at least a month to see if this app really works. However, it seems to be promising in its approach.
According to the app, it takes about 66 days to form a new habit. If you’re feeling a little stressed out and overwhelmed as this semester is unfolding, why not give “HabitBull” a try? It’s available for no cost for both Apple and Android devices.