App of the week: Balanced

Welcome back to our weekly spotlight on helpful apps. We focus on a variety of products that are useful for work, personal use, or both, providing our own thoughts on the apps and what you can do with them. This week we take some time for ourselves with Balanced.

An intro to Balanced
Nobody ever said a task list has to contain only work items. Smartphones are great for personal use too, and Balanced aims to help users achieve a more balanced life.

Yes, you can write in your own work tasks, but the preloaded menu items are all about your own wellbeing; you’ll find activities related to stress relief, fitness, creativity and confidence, among others. Balanced is designed to reward you for doing something positive while keeping you mindful about sticking to your goals.

When you download the free version, you can add up to five tasks and choose how often you want to do them, whether it’s six times a week or twice a year.

Our review
I recommend starting out with the free version – which lets you add up to five tasks to your list – so you can give it a try for a few weeks and see if the app helps you build good habits. It definitely did for me, so I upgraded Balanced for £2.99 to add more activities to my list and customise the icons.

My main goal when I downloaded Balanced was to force myself to read more and spend more time relaxing. Within a couple of weeks I found myself automatically opening up a book and reading a chapter at least three times a week. Just so I could swipe that task off my list.

The app makes it really simple to complete tasks; all you have to do is swipe right and the item drops to the bottom of the list and the app tells you that you’ve done a good job. Each task tells you how long it has been since you last completed it, while the Pulse report graphs out how well you’ve done over the course of the month.

The verdict
I enjoyed using Balanced better than any other to-do list app I’ve tested, probably because it was focused on me and not my workload. The app sends out notifications every once in a while to give you a gentle reminder if you haven’t completed a task recently – but don’t worry, they’re not annoying like other notifications. It makes a nice change from the constant reminders to do your work or run errands.

It’s a very simple design, but sometimes that’s all you need out of an app that’s meant to help you relax.

Download Balanced here