“You can’t improve what you don’t measure,” but it feels like we have far too many measuring devices. You have one app for your workouts, another app for tracking your food, another for your to-do list, another for your reminders, and another for your budget. Your phone is cluttered—and your life is too.
To be more productive, it helps to be more streamlined. So apps like Lumen Trails are here to make your life simpler. Let’s jump into our review, and see if Lumen Trails’ Daily Tracker is right for you!
What Is Lumen Trails?
Lumen Trails is part of Lumen Spark, a software company based out of Seattle. Lumen Trails is a logbook of your daily activity—it helps you track your time, workouts, expenses, calories, food, and anything else you want to keep tabs on. Instead of having many different apps, you combine them all into one easy place.
It’s simple and intuitive to you—add categories, track your progress, and see growth over time. It can sync across several devices—though it only works on Apple programs like Mac and iOS.
How Does Lumen Trails Work?
Lumen Trails runs on any Apple devices, all you have to do is download it. The concept of Lumen Trails is simple—tap the + to create a new category, name the category, name the units, and save it to start using. The strength of Lumen Trails is the customization feature—the concept is simple, but you can adjust it to any of your needs.
When you create a new category, you can choose from the many templates Lumen already has, from budget to body weight trackers. You can also choose your own format. You can create a list with notes—to help you organize your thoughts, or as a checklist and to do list. You can create a number tracker, tracking up to as many decimal points as you’d like. You can also create a category that tracks time, and you can even use a built-in stop watch to help you track your time.
Reminders is a special category—it allows you to take notes, with the newest on at the top. You can take a normal text note, or a photo, or add an image, or even mark your location. Lumen Trails connects to Apple’s Maps, so you can mark where found that great coffee shop, or even where you parked your car.
You can also keep track of your budget on Lumen Trails. Budget serves as the larger folder, and you then name different categories within in it—groceries, rent, entertainment, and more. For each category, you set the amount budgeted to it—and then use – or + whenever you spend or deposit money. As you put in each amount that you spend, your total will change to reflect it. You can add notes to each entry as well—so you know when you spent money on coffee, or when you spent it on car repairs.
You can utilize the workout category as well—there’s a timer you start when you start working out, and stop when you’re done. It has a built-in additive feature, which means it adds up all the times you’ve worked out. Most categories have this ability, where it is additive—but with some, like body weight, you probably don’t need it.
The other advantage of Lumen Trails is that it keeps record of your tracking. At any time, you can go to the Track button, and see how you’ve done this week, month, and even year. You can see these as summaries, or as graphs to see your progress over time.
Want to share a category with someone else? You can airdrop it, or export it as a spreadsheet to Google Drive.
How To Use Lumen Trails
You are unique—so what works well for you will be unique as well. Fortunately, Lumen Trail’s customization makes it easy for you have whatever you need. Take full advantage of it by experimenting with different categories—use the templates, edit them, make new ones, make them your own. Also take advantage of the motivation that manually entering your progress brings. Every time you complete a workout, you get a mini celebration of adding that time in. Every time you spend money, you see how much it is lowering your balance.
You can also take advantage of Lumen Trail’s search function to help you stay on track. Hit search, and it browses through all of your notes to find that word. Not only that, but it shows you how long ago you made the note—so you know how long it’s been since your last doctor’s appointment, or when your dog last had her shots.
Another way to use Lumen Trails best is to use it to track patterns. Take advantage of notes—say what you’re spending money on, say how you’re feeling each day. As you look back over the month, you’ll be able to see patterns appear, and see the changes you need to implement.
Lumen Trails Alternatives
Lumen Trails Vs. RescueTime
While Lumen Trails is unique in its set up, RescueTime is another app that helps you track what you’re doing. While RescueTime focuses on your online habits, it does so with no input from you—it tracks your time itself, seeing where and how long you spend online. RescueTime also works on all devices, be that Mac or Windows, Android or iOS. It gives you full graphs and summaries of your habits, so you can see how much time you have spent where, and whether you spent your time on productive work, or on more distracting sites. RescueTime even has a Focus Timer—that blocks any distracting sites, allowing you to complete that assignment that is due, or that project that needs to be ready tomorrow.
However, RescueTime does encourage you to upgrade to their paid account, where you can use many of those tools—which costs more than Lumen Trail’s free price tag. RescueTime also doesn’t have as much flexibility as Lumen Trails, and it can’t track everything like Lumen Trails can. Lumen Trails is much more versatile, and thus more powerful at simplifying your life and helping you to stay on track.
Conclusion: Lumen Trails
Lumen Trails Daily Tracker is an unassuming little app—but it’s a powerful one. It allows you to compile all your life into one place, and to truly track it—seeing your habits and progress over time. Though it is only available on Apple devices, it is free, and is customizable to fit all of your needs. If you want to track anything—your budget, your workouts, your miles driven, or states visited—then Lumen Trails is a great app for you.
