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We’ve Found A Shortcut On How To Give Yourself A Winning Streak In Life

By Kelly Noble

Posted on July 22, 2015

There’s a new app on the market, and we love it.

Let’s face it. We love our phones and we love apps that make our lives easier. Apps that help us succeed in life are even better, but there’s a LOT of them out there which are filled with empty promises. Until now. Your future is in your hands, and it’s as simple as downloading Streaks.

Streaks is an Adelaide-made productivity app for iPhone, launched in June 2015 by Quentin Zervaas (programming) and Isaac Forman (design). It’s been featured by the New York Observer, Fast Company, Product Hunt, Techable, Upcrate, Lifehacker and Apple’s App Store in dozens of countries.

Streaks is all about building daily habits by “streaks” of ticking off the same task each day. These are things that many of us wish we’d do more like reading, eating well, learning a language, or exercising. It’s also great for things like writing a blog or book, practicing an instrument and working on a project. Your daily tasks can be as easy (drink water, floss teeth) or as difficult (run 10km) as you like.

It builds on the don’t-break-the-chain habit method, but keeps users focused with a clean interface based around up to six daily tasks. Most to-do apps let people stretch themselves too thin with infinite tasks and they fail and give up, or they focus on just task which is too easy to drop and forget. A handful of tasks means there’s always something you can complete that day, even when you need a break from one or are too busy to finish them all.

“With Streaks, we were both aware of how the typical to-do app was failing in terms of keeping users on track with repeatable tasks. We tried and ditched them one after another. Habits and apps are easy to forget and abandon. They are plain lists. They get insurmountably long” says Foreman.

“But we weren’t making time to read, we were skipping time on side projects, or had dropped hobbies – things that we could ideally bring back into our lives and really wanted to make time for.

“Streaks is something we built for ourselves first and foremost, but we’ve seen great adoption amongst friends and a very positive reaction from users all around the world. We figure if it can motivate us and others, as a paid app it’s a small price to pay.”

With newer iPhones, the integrated Health functionality means that various physical tasks (walking or riding) are tracked automatically.

The app is available in 10+ languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian. An Android version of the app is in the works.