Every year, millions of Americans ring in the New Year with the best intentions to turn over a new leaf and make significant changes. They often write out long lists of resolutions and even sometimes make detailed plans for accomplishing them.
And yet fewer than 10% of those that make resolutions ever feel they are successful in accomplishing them.
Why is that? Well, making a resolution in January is one thing but finding the tools to keep us motivated in February, March, April and even September is a whole other thing.
The good news is, technology can help.
Whether you need help keeping your New Year’s resolutions or goals you set any other time of the year, here are 4 surefire ways that technology can increase your motivation.
1. Fitness: Motivation through progress tracking
While technology usually helps us do less, with physical fitness, technology can actually make us do more.
From reminders to get up and move to tracking how much we move, technology can help us lead more active, healthy lives.
Physical movement makes us look and feel better and helps prevent various diseases and illnesses that might occur later in life. Staying active reduces the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease and may even increase cognitive functions.
Not only can fitness tech keep us motivated, but it can also get us started.
There are several fitness trackers that offer pre-made workout plans, which include warm-up and cool-down sessions, and offering encouragement along the way. They can even suggest target goals and provide daily motivation to achieve them.
With all the information served on a plate, we have fewer excuses for inactivity. And when technology tracks our progress, we become more accountable, so sticking to the habit is more likely than before.
2. Health: Improving habits by monitoring data
Motivational technologies cannot only encourage us to engage in better and more effective behaviours, but they can analyze what we are doing now and make suggestions for doing them better.
Some of our most basic daily habits often form at a very early age before we were aware there may be a right and a wrong way of doing things. Something as simple as brushing your teeth may be a daily practice you’ve never thought about before.
A smart toothbrush can help you brush your teeth better by telling you what areas of your mouth you may miss or where you may need to spend more time brushing.
Many apps and technologies available today can monitor certain aspects of our health and lead us to live a healthier life by reminding us to take time to breathe or take a moment to sit and meditate.
3. School: Interactive and connected studying
We spend a good portion of our lives believing there would come a time when we could kiss studying goodbye for good. Eventually, most of us figure out that day will never come.
Whether you are a student trying to ace finals or a professional studying for licensing exams or even a foreign driver’s license, there is a wide range of technologies available now to ease the process.
For instance, OCR or Optical Character Recognition technology, like that used in Office Lens from Microsoft, can take data written on a whiteboard and convert it into an editable document.
Technology has not only offered a wide range of products to help us study, but it is also changing how we learn. Studying used to be something you did on your own or with a study group of your immediate peers.
Now, social learning networks are on the rise that can allow you to study with study groups across your state, back in your hometown or even across the world.
You can exchange lectures, notes, and books and may even learn far more than you would just from the class itself. Apps like GoConqr are helping students access an entire network of resources unheard of just a decade ago.
For exchange students living in a country that does not speak their native language, language barriers can also be a barrier to effective learning. With social learning networks, students can get help and have access to resources that will help them learn in their own language, no matter where they are taking a class.
Technology can also help you develop good study habits by helping to break down larger tasks into smaller chunks or even manage your time better. Some same productivity apps that help professionals be more successful in the business; like Pomodoro Timer, Any.do or Self Control can also help you be more efficient.
Whether it’s mind-mapping apps or apps that help you better manage your study “to-do” list, productivity apps can do the same things for you they do for busy professionals.
4. Business: Boosting collaboration
Teamwork has always been essential in the business world, but with the rise of remote employees, working as a team has become even more of a challenge.
Collaboration used to involve trying to get a certain number of people in your office all together at once or maintaining communication with people you see every day or most days.
Now, you may try to collaborate with colleagues that live half a world away, in a completely different time zone.
Technology allows coworkers from across the city, country or globe to all have access to the same information and even collaborate in real time. Someone can post a document in one location that the entire group can read and edit immediately, with each change being differently highlighted.
Not only does this allow things run more smoothly, but it can also help remote workers not feel so isolated.
It can help individuals feel they are a part of something larger and are doing or achieving something bigger than themselves.
And after all, isn’t that what draws us to work in teams in the first place?
Technology can also ensure we don’t skip or miss important tasks and even issue reminders for deadlines. Google calendar is just one of the many tools that offer features like a smart reschedule-a lab that will reschedule anything you cancel, so you don’t forget about it – and can’t avoid it if it’s something you don’t want to do.
People sometimes blame technology for communication or relationships breakdowns, but in reality, it’s just a tool that can build or destroy.
Yes, sometimes burying our noses in our phones can prohibit conversation, but long before there were phones, there were books, magazines, newspapers and a hundred other things to bury our noses in to avoid conversation.
Technology is neutral, it’s all about how we use it. So why not use it to help stay motivated?
I hope you have found this post interesting and informative. Be sure to share it with your friends and family so they can see how technology can increase your motivation.
Michelle Laurey is Wisconsin born and raised, daughter of two Beatles fans. Recently she started writing about the world that surrounds her, and her life’s experiences. She likes to explore new places, fat cats and the smell of books. When not writing or reading, she enjoys binge-watching “Billions” episodes with her boyfriend and tries to embrace her new “Profit first” mentality.Author: Michelle Laurey
