Tech that can help you stick to your New Year’s resolutions

Join me in bidding “adieu” and good riddance to 2020. You may just be hoping that 2021 will bring better things, but there are ways to make that wish a reality rather than a prayer. Setting attainable New Year’s resolutions is one of them, but you may need extra help sticking to them after this challenging year. There’s a ton of tech that can help you meet your goals and stick to them until they become ingrained habits. If you’ve made any of the popular resolutions below, we’ve got recommendations for gadgets and services that can aid you on your path to betterment.

Get healthy
Smiling sportswoman crouching, taking a break, and using phone after running in nature.millann via Getty Images
Even if you’re not a New Year’s resolution person, you’ve probably told yourself that you’d try to work out more or cut back on the cake once January came around. Don’t feel bad if, after a few weeks (or days), you found yourself slumping back into your old, sedentary routine -- most people do. Trying to be healthier is harder than it seems, but at its core, it’s about building better habits.

One way to build and keep new habits is by holding yourself accountable with a habit tracker. While you can get deep into this subject if you wander down a bullet-journal rabbit hole, a habit-tracking app is probably the easier option. Done and Strides are two iOS options that let you log when you’ve completed a new habit you’re trying to build or when you avoided a bad habit that you’re trying to break. You can get pretty granular, customizing how often you want to do a task, setting reminders to log, reviewing stats and more. However, both apps have paid tiers to which you’ll be asked to subscribe to after you create a couple of trackable habits.

If you’re not trying to tack on yet another subscription to your monthly bills, consider an app like Streaks which is all yours for a one-time cost of $5. As for Android, Grow is a free app that takes a similar approach to habit tracking that Forest takes with time management. You plant a tree with each new habit tracked and you’ll watch it grow every time you log a completion. There’s also Habitica, which turns habit tracking to an 8-bit RPG game in which your custom avatar levels up every time you log a task.

If you want to focus on exercise, there’s a bunch of tech that can be of assistance. Investing in a smartwatch or a fitness tracker is the obvious first step because, not only do those gadgets passively monitor activity and sleep all day, but they also let you track the workouts. Fitbit’s $100 Inspire 2 band is an easy way into the world of wearables -- it monitors daily activity and 24/7 heart rate, and with its 10-day battery life, it’ll last long enough to capture information about your sleeping habits while you wear it overnight. The Fitbit app is also quite easy for new users to figure out, and you can track things like water consumption, menstrual cycle and more with it.

The Apple Watch Series 6 (left) next to the Apple Watch Series 5 (right) on a wooden table.Valentina Palladino / Engadget
You can go one step further and invest in an Apple Watch if you want a more comprehensive device. It’s the best wearable you can get if you have an iPhone and you don’t even have to pay $350 for the most advanced Series 6 to get features like a built-in GPS, fall detection, emergency SOS and noise monitoring -- the $279 Apple Watch SE has those, too. Both Fitbit devices and the Apple Watch work with third-party health apps like MapMyRun, MyFitnessPal and Lose It, but Apple’s device will also sync to Apple Health -- something that Fitbit devices still can’t do. If you’re an Android user, we recommend a smartwatch like the Fitbit Sense or the Galaxy Watch Active 2.

It’s easy to say that you’ll work out more, but figuring out exactly what to do can be frustrating. Running and cycling (if you have a bike) are easy options, but if neither of those activities is your style, you can use at-home workout services to inject variety into your routine. Now, I don’t believe you need to be motivated to work out -- in fact, I believe if you wait until you’re motivated to do so, you’ll probably never get to it (that goes for any new habit you’re trying to build). But knowing that you have a bunch of new exercise routines to choose from can be a good inspiration to get your butt off the couch and onto a mat. And now, there are so many at-home workout options to choose from thanks in part to this year’s quarantine restrictions. You can simply search on YouTube for a core-strength routine or follow a fitness guru’s short videos on Instagram. But there are more structured options, too, and two solid ones are Daily Burn and Fitness Blender.

Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2Engadget
The former is a big player in the at-home workout space. It’s been around since 2007 and has a plethora of on-demand workout videos to choose from. Everything from barre, to strength training, to outdoor running is included under Daily Burn’s umbrella. You can filter out exactly which types of workouts you’re looking for, specifying duration, intensity and more.

But those new to exercising will probably like the Daily Burn 365 workouts the most. Every day, there’s a new workout that you can complete either live at 9AM ET or anytime thereafter. If you don’t want to think too much about which workout to do each day, these videos remove that decision entirely -- just log on in the morning and participate. Daily Burn also has one of the more generous free trials (30 days) so you can give it a go before deciding if you want to pay the $20 monthly charge for the subscription.

Fitness Blender is essentially a free yet limited version of a service like Daily Burn. It’s a website where you can find hundreds of free workout videos. Yes, you could just go to YouTube, but there’s a consistent level of quality that comes with Fitness Blenders’ videos. You’re also able to filter workouts by duration, difficulty, body focus, equipment used and more, which is something YouTube can’t replicate.

Get organized

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