Life as a writer can sometimes feel like a profound juggling act. Between family responsibilities, day jobs, and the complex work that comes with the independent publisher territory, self-care and positive habit building can often feel like the last things we have time to worry about. But everyone should know by now that our habits can play a major role in our success—or at least the time that it takes to achieve our most meaningful goals. So where do you start when you already feel so much weight on your shoulders?
Great news: There's an app for that.
The Finch app provides gamified self-care in the form of a pet “birb” that you nurture on your journey of growth by completing tasks and building habits to send it on adventures to locations around the world.
“We believe self-care is essential and we strive to make it a natural part of everyday life,” writes Finch’s Vice President of Marketing Katie Shill. “In a world that glorifies overwork and self-neglect, we’re redefining well-being—empowering people to care for themselves with the same compassion they show others—through a fun, motivating, and meaningful experience.”
Inside the app, you’ll customize your “birb,” whose design is based on the real-life zebra finch. Then, you’ll send it on daily adventures by completing self-care goals you've selected. You can choose goals from a list of suggestions or self-care “journeys,” or you can create your own goals. As you complete your goals, your birb can acquire its own micropets, furniture for its home, clothing, and accessories.
The app also provides weekly reports to give you an overview of your goal progress. You can access insights any time to see which goals you’re completing the most and which goals you’re missing most often. Notifications can be adjusted to remind you to work on a particular goal at a day and time you set.
Each month, Finch releases a new theme with fun goodies you can earn by completing your chosen goals. Additionally, you and your friends or family members can “visit” each other, send your birbs on daily adventures together, and send one another gifts and words of encouragement.
Along with habit tracking, Finch offers goal-setting and mindfulness tools, including journaling prompts, meditations, breathing exercises, and more. The app has both free and paid features, and users can even opt to become a “guardian” by sponsoring premium memberships for those who are sticking with their goals but who may not be able to afford upgrades on their own.
Finch for Authors
For authors, the Finch app can represent a gateway to structure, progress, and small but consistent acts of self-care, even when life feels chaotic. If your goal is to build or rebuild a consistent daily writing routine, you can create that goal and track it, and you’ll be rewarded every time you achieve that daily task. As the seasons change, you, too, can change. Over time, you can edit, alter, or replace your goals as needed to fit your life. You can start small, such as with a goal of one hundred, two hundred, or five hundred words, then edit the goal from one time per day to two times per day or more as your habit grows.
Consider setting once-per-week goals, such as a “30 Minutes of Social Media Work” on Mondays, or once-per-month goals, such as “Monthly Review and Planning Session” on the last Sunday of each month. Every goal created, whether focused on self-care or productivity, is completely customizable and can help indie authors build or improve their self-care, systems, and writing consistency—and whole-life balance—in a fun, trackable, and rewarding way.
Consider adopting your own birb with the Finch app, and you may just adopt a more balanced writing life in the process.
Audrey Hughey
