Apps that Help Me Make it Through the Day (Part 1)

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I jokingly call my smartphone my "external brain," but honestly it's not a joke. I can't imagine living without it. Yes, I use it for fun, for entertainment, but more than anything it's a tool to keep my life somewhat sane.

If you have any issues with mental health or auto-immune diseases that affect your mind and body, I'm sure you can understand. No matter how much I try to keep my life organized, there is just way too much information to try to keep up with and less brainpower than I've ever had in my life in which to do it.

I thought this week I would list some of the apps that I regularly use to help stay on top of things.

CHROME INTERNET BROWSER...

    I found Google's Chrome browser many years ago, when they were one of the very few, or maybe the only, browser that you could use on multiple platforms and share info. I have a system of bookmark files for various parts of my life and I save bookmarks like crazy. Sometimes I go through them to clean them out because I get too many and some are no longer useful. But having the same access to those bookmarks makes many tasks easier - and I have that same access on my phone, desk computer, or laptop.  

TEXTRA...

     It might not be the same now, but my texting program on the phone I had a few years ago stunk. I hunted around the app store and found Textra. It's really not that special but one feature I love is that you can pin certain contacts to the top of your texts. I have seven people who rotate around in those first seven spots and so it's always easy to find them when I want to text them again. There are also some personalization that can be done, such as assigning specific colors and individual ringtones or vibration patterns to each person.

ALARM CLOCK PLUS...

    This is one of the few apps that I paid for. It includes a good bit of personalization like how long you want your sleep timer to be either for all of your alarms or by the individual alarm. It also allows for specific ringtones to be attached to certain alarms. Again, a lot of these options are standard now but when I first found Alarm Clock Plus, they were rare. Oh... I also love the nap option, where you set an amount of time before the alarm goes off, not a specific time of day. I'm actually using a nap timer right now. When it goes off, I have to leave.

    Well, guess what? It JUST went off. I'll finish this later.

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