The last drops of rain were still falling when I went out to run. I was first on the footpath beside the river. Ringlets overlapped each other in the water.

I was already on my way back when my neighbors started coming out for their runs. I had mine, alone. The entire footpath to myself. No one to judge my stride. No one to inspect my breathing. No one but myself.

I’m thinking. Last week was hell. I had to lend myself to three, no four, classes and I had some stuff of my own to finish. I knew that even if I satisfy one class, there will be another to complain. If I succeed making all happy, there will be an issue somewhere; there always is. Like this time, it was a network virus attack. If I solve that, there’s still my stuff to do, that I couldn’t do. And if for some miracle, I finish everything, I still need time for myself and my love ones.

That was last week. Before Friday ended, I told myself “Saturday, we binge.” So I indulged myself in two ways. First off: I loaded myself with junk food. Lots of it. (I think my initial objective was to make myself sick for Monday. Failed.) Next, I had an iPhone software download spree. And this was actually helpful. And I thought of sharing my insight.

These are my findings:

PocketMoney. This app is a lifesaver. I’ve been using it for less than a week, and I think it has saved me at least 5 dollars already. My main problem with other similar apps is they cannot handle multiple accounts. And multiple accounts is an essential to anybody. I’d even say that everyone with a bank account needs at least two accounts. Cuz money does not always come from your bank when you pay for things. Most of the time, it makes a detour, or it spends a vacation. Where? In your pocket. And while it is there, if you only have an accounting of your money in the bank, then you don’t know who’s spending time in the RITZ hotel in your pocket. PocketMoney handles this. It records transferring of funds from account to account. With other software, withdrawing money from the bank, must either be ignored or considered lost, temporarily. With pocketmoney, you could give your money a chance to stay in “purgatory,” since it doesn’t know what destination it’s going to yet. In short, you have an account for each of your bank accounts recorded in the app. Then have an account for your wallet and track it and the transfers between all of them, especially when you withdraw money. If you wanted to be more specific, you could even track the money that you put in your sock. And not only does the app handle multiple accounts, it could also set up budgets. These budgets could be set up daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly or yearly so that you could tell if you are spending too much on food or whatever at any given time.

Touchtodo. This app is actually one of the many to-do lists out there. I mentioned before how having too many todo apps is not beneficial at all. After the week that passed, I knew I really needed something to handle my schedules. I went from one app to another. Looked at numerous comparisons between to-do apps. And found that the best app for me would be Touchtodo. Besides the fact that it can do almost everything that the other to-do lists could do, it has one feature that was essential for me. The ability to sync to Google calendars. It may sound trivial. But the ability to sync to Google offers a whole range of other features. One of which is its ability to add items into the iPhone’s main calendar. Google could even send you SMS for free on selected countries (including this island I live in currently). Choosing Touchtodo was actually tough. Because there was another cool app called LifeBalance that offered another feature I wanted. LifeBalance would automatically show you a pie chart of the areas of your life and how much time you spend on each. Then you tell the app how you want to prioritize in your life and it will reorganize your todo list to better fit your priorities. The only reason I did not get this app is because it does not sync to Google’s calendar and the desktop companion that allows for syncs cost an arm and leg.

Touchgoal. As the vendor says “Touch Goal is a simple yet powerful tool to track your goals and habits. Setup daily goals and track them with just a touch. Watch your daily score to gage your success and use negative goals (or vices) to confront and overcome bad habits that finally need to get the boot.” My goals are as follows: blog, read, run, drink water, devotion, account. shave.

WordPress. Well, this is the app I’m using right now to post in WordPress.

You probably noticed that I am really trying hard to change my life—to make it better. The idea is to end your day and measure it, not according to the percentage of people around you you satisfied, but instead to ask what did you did to the 24 hours you had and to check whether it was better than the 24 hours you had yesterday.