It seems there is no impossible task for a smartphone. It can be your planner, book, camera, radio, news source and now, your accountability partner.
Lift, an application for iPhones, wants to help users change their lives in big ways through small actions by identifying goals and tracking how often they are accomplished. It aims to merge community support with personal goals to create what the app officially calls habits.
Habits can be anything from simple lifestyle changes like drinking more water or making the bed to loftier goals like exercising or quitting smoking.
Once you choose which habits you want to focus on (by browsing through already created habits or creating them yourself), tracking them is remarkably simple. For each day you sustain a habit, you press one button - there's no regard to the time of day it happens or for how long you do it. It's about doing it every day.
Lift works best with daily goals, based on the feeling of accomplishment to look back and see that, for example, you exercised 20 days in a row. According to the website, "the biggest predictor of success in Lift is having an easy habit that you do every day." I'll admit it: being able to check-in on my daily goals feels good, like checking something off a to-do list. Despite this, Lift will still work with non-daily habits.
The app uses simple graphics that allow you to look back at your progress (or failure) in maintaining goals. Interactive bar graphs that reveal frequency per week and frequency per month as well as a calendar can help you determine your success.
The other aspect of Lift is community support. If the thought of breaking a 20-day bed-making streak doesn't overpower your laziness, perhaps encouragement from other users will.
I connected both my Facebook and Twitter accounts to Lift, and unsurprisingly, none of my friends were using it. Still, there are ways to gain encouragement from Lift users, even if you don't know them.
When you pull up each of your habits, you can see and interact with other users who are also forming that habit. When others log their goal, you can "prop" their check-in, similar to "liking" on Facebook, although meant to be more uplifting.
Lift's website said, "You're 50 percent more likely to succeed in your goal if you know at least one other person doing it." This is true; think about how much easier it is to go on a diet or to the gym with a friend.
The problem is I personally know no one currently using Lift. Yes, it's great that Kathy from Utah flossed her teeth for 30 days in a row, but it's useless encouragement for my own motivation.
It's important to note Lift isn't a shortcut to accomplishing goals. It's merely an aide with which you can change from someone who plans to achieve goals to someone who actually achieves them.
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