To achieve these goals, use these apps to relieve stress

With Thanksgiving break two weeks away, the motivation to work decreases day by day. As we try to push through the last wave of midterms and various applications, there is a constant tethering between where we are and where we want to be. For some, just getting through the day is enough, but for others, there is an increasing pressure to work until presented with an award for a certain amount of effort. In a culture where there is an emphasis on working until retirement, there is a subconscious process within us that translates success to beating out the competition. Whether this competition is a single person or a group of applicants, the end goal becomes more about proving something to others than ourselves. We depreciate our single accomplishments to pay attention to others who appear to have their lives together, filing them in our mental “#goals” folder. Fortunately, there are ways to place ourselves within this folder and begin to see how impactful completing daily tasks can be.

Stress and time management play a major role in productivity but an underrated skill is
goal-setting. Like success, a goal is usually understood to be
long-term and effective on a large scale, but even small goals can be milestones. Creating something as simple as a to-do list can not only enhance organization but can also provide a sense of satisfaction in knowing something was accomplished that day, no matter how big or how small. The best way to go about this is investing in a yearly planner or using a phone calendar to get organized.
Color-coding within the planner or setting different notification sounds on a phone can make planning more exciting; the variation of cues stimulates mental processing by catching one’s attention and establishes different levels of importance for each task as well. Maintaining a to-do list can be a goal itself for some of us, but apps have also been developed to help categorize life’s daily demands.

Two apps that help the professional and the student get their life together are Planner Plus and myHomework Student Planner. Both of these apps have options to organize duties daily or monthly and are also free. Planner Plus divides the work between events, tasks and notes with color-coding and offers a syncing option so one’s progress can be tracked on multiple devices. myHomework Student Planner keeps school work in order by labeling them according to priority, type and class, and also provides updates for upcoming and late assignments. The beauty of utilizing apps is that they save space, save paper and, most importantly, give users the ability to continue moving at their own pace.

Using a planner, digital or physical, can be self-motivating as it provides an opportunity to individualize the path to success. Understanding that short-term goals are stepping stones to
long-term goals is the first phase of this path. The best way to know if improvement is happening is by keeping track of checkpoints, which can be simplified to the little tasks within the daily routines we all experience. In turn, grasping the significance of completing everyday plans clues us into the subjectivity of what constitutes a successful life. From this, we can start to file our own accomplishments in the #goals folder and continue to raise the bar for ourselves. Regardless of whether a goal is motivated by a paycheck or simply the feeling of completion, it is important to develop a system that emphasizes personal progress over societal definitions of success.