6 Free Apps That Will Improve Your Life
One of my favourite parts of Nir Eyal’s Hooked is what he calls the Manipulation Matrix. It looks like this:
In brief, the matrix classifies you as a maker of a product based on 1) whether or not you use the product yourself, and 2) whether or not your product improves your users’ lives.
In a recent conversation with a friend, we discussed what companies we’d consider working for, and the Manipulation Matrix immediately came to mind. Because my ideal is to be a Facilitator, I made the argument that I could never work for a company like Facebook. I’d simply feel guilty going to bed knowing that I had helped humanity waste millions of hours on stuff like this. Mark Zuckerberg may have great intentions and visions for the future, but I honestly do not think Facebook as a product materially improves my life.
This naturally led me to the more positive and also more interesting question: which products have materially improved my life?
To answer this question, I re-visited my Happy Map and my State of Zen, and pulled out the following activities that make me genuinely happy:
- Developing ideas
- Traveling
- Learning
- Meeting new people and having good conversations
- Meditating
- Practicing foreign languages
With these activities in mind, it was pretty straightforward to list 6 apps that have materially improved my life. Hopefully these could be of use for you as well. Enjoy!
1. Evernote
After 3,000+ notes over 6+ years, I’m pretty far to the right in Evernote’s famous smile graph. I still get a warm and fuzzy feeling when I see the elephant in green on my iPhone screen.
Evernote has helped me:
- Keep a journal when traveling
- Remember and develop ideas
- Research and learn new things
- Build vocabulary in foreign languages
… plus tons of other things.
I know a lot of people with very diverse backgrounds who have told me that Evernote has changed their life. No wonder Evernote has achieved cult-like status in places like Japan and Silicon Valley.
2. Couchsurfing
I honestly haven’t used Couchsurfing in a while now, but it’s still one my favourite websites. I have so many wonderful memories from meeting new people from around the world, and having conversations that cross borders and cultures. It must be an amazing feeling for the makers of Couchsurfing knowing that they’ve helped create millions of encounters between people that otherwise would never have met. They also deserve credit for paving the way for other products in the sharing economy, such as AirBnb.
3. Coursera
Just a few years ago, the best professors in the world were restricted to the fortunate few students who had made it to the likes of Stanford and MIT. Now, thanks to Coursera, the teaching capacity of these professors has literally become limitless. As long as you have a computer and a decent internet connection, you can now learn anything from Jazz Improvisation by Gary Burton to Machine Learning by Andrew Ng anywhere in the world, for free.
4. Finn.no
Unless you’re Norwegian, you probably don’t know Finn, but you might know one of its cousins if you’ve lived in countries such as Italy (Subito.it), Spain (Vibbo.es), France (Leboncoin.fr), or Sweden (Blocket.se).
(For the record: I work for Schibsted Media Group, which owns Finn, Subito, Vibbo, Leboncoin, Blocket, and a range of other marketplaces.)
In brief, Finn is a generalist marketplace where you buy and sell anything from mobile phones and baby clothes to houses.
For me, the magic of Finn happens in meeting new people, making win-win deals (“I’m moving and need to get rid of this bed” + “I just moved here and need a new bed”) and environmental sustainability through re-use (the 5 sites mentioned above together help save about 12.5M tons of greenhouse gases every year). I’ve personally done deals on everything from concert tickets to furniture, from baby equipment to guitars, on Finn and Vibbo. All of these encounters left me with a pleasant feeling that both parties came out of it with a good deal.
5. Headspace
If you’re like me, you might have dabbled in meditation for a few years, but then never really managed to build a habit for it. With Headspace, meditation is now a natural part of my daily morning routine. At this very moment of writing, there are 23,874 people meditating using Headspace. That’s a lot of people reducing stress and anxiety, increasing focus and creativity, and improving their relationships with other people all at once.
6. Duolingo
I used Duolingo when I learned German in 30 days, and I still get surprised whenever I meet an old friend who enthusiastically tells me about “this app called Duolingo which has finally gotten me to actually learn French”. The phrase “democratising X” is a bit of a cliché, but Duolingo has truly democratised language learning.
With Duolingo you can literally go from “I’ve always wanted to learn Spanish” to “Ojalá fuera bizco para verte dos veces” in a matter of weeks.
Honorable mentions
A list is never complete without a few honorable mentions. Here are three more apps that I think materially improve the lives of their users:
- Todoist: The best task-management (aka to-do) app I’ve come across. Watches your to-do’s so that you can use your precious brainpower on other things.
- OkCupid: Aims to find a partner for you using its matching algorithm. About 200 people going on a date tonight through OkCupid will end up getting married. Now, think about how many babies are born every day because their parents met on OkCupid. This app basically generates humans.
- Memrise: Helps you remember things like new words in a foreign language through spaced repetition. Addictive in a healthy way.
So there you have it. These are the apps that have improved my life the most. What are the apps that have had the biggest positive impact on your life?
Thanks for reading this article. If you liked it, I would really appreciate if you could recommend or share. A comment with your feedback on the article would also be very helpful.
