My favourite productivity app for a time was SoundCloud. It’s not your traditional productivity app, as it just plays music. There’s no accountability feature, timers, notifications, or anything of the sort. For me, it was the occasional music player that I used when I needed to get into a writing zone and I had trouble concentrating.
And I’ll be honest… it wasn’t all that great.
The type of music I like is songs sung in Japanese (so basically K-Pop type of music), soft piano playing, and lo-fi. And what I found with SoundCloud is that music didn’t change all that much either. It was always some kind of remake of a song I heard when I first joined the platform a long time ago or listened to a few years ago.
And even with that “concentration” music of mine, it still took me several hours to get an article complete.
I found myself getting distracted, loading up Steam, and playing some video games for a bit just to “mull over what to write next”. In other words, I procrastinated work in the middle of doing work.
For the past several months, my output for articles has been consistent, regardless of my procrastination tendencies. But my current output wasn’t all that satisfactory. Over the course of an entire day, I only managed a single article.
And between a quota of articles for clients and other projects in the back of my mind that I wanted to do, I was slowly feeling overwhelmed. It was to the point where I didn’t get much satisfaction from the articles I was publishing, despite putting my thoughts, research, and soul into those articles. I didn’t have enough time to really enjoy publishing something.
All of that changed from a simple change in my life that came out of the blue one day. My decision to open and read an email from someone offering a productivity and wellness app called Sukha.
Sukha, The Productivity App
Shortly after I received the email, I hopped onto a meeting with the CEO themselves, Steven Puri. In that brief meeting, we went over our own productivity and self-help philosophies, and I was given the opportunity to get a taste for the productivity app itself.
The premise for the app was simple: Sukha is designed to be the future of work.
It was given this name for the reason that the initial users said they felt one thing when using the app: happy. Sukha is a translation of that word.
While the company is still growing, along with its user base, one of the problems I see with companies is how often they can lose the meaning behind their name. For businesses, branding is crucial in so many ways. The biggest of which is to make customers feel a certain way when interacting with that brand.
Between slogans, mascots, and the design of the brand itself, we are meant to derive particular meanings from those things.
For apps, this is crucial as well.
Even though my experience with apps is fairly limited, I believe that Sukha has really grasped its namesake in both its features and its functions.
At the end of the day, the app itself is a sophisticated Pomodoro Technique timer. One can set this up easily by just telling their phone to set a timer for an allotted time while they focus on work. But the way Sukha does it for theirs is much better. They know what it means to be happy while working on something.
And the reason they know this is because the thousands of users who use it have boosted their productivity specifically because of this app.
Welcome To My Office
I took this in the middle of my break time, but this is what you can expect from entering “my office” and your possibly future one. Every day I’m greeted with some nice music playing, a simple UI that helps me get back into flow, a fluffy quote, a calm background, and a community that I can engage with at any time and share my work with.
These small additional features work in wondrous ways from a productivity standpoint.
Having accountability ensures that you are on task, and having someone cheering you on or checking up on you is good. Heck, you can even pair up with them and work along with them with the “Work with a Buddy” button.
Beyond that, we know that Pomodoro techniques are very effective in what they do. There are plenty of studies and articles talking about how they can help us gain focus.
And while there are plenty of other productivity strategies to try out, this productivity app has several placed in a convenient spot.
It’s clear that this company is going beyond just a fancy timer that you can download from the app store.
Beyond the community, fantastic music, and co-working feature, there is also that breathe button during break time. It lets you go through a guiding exercise where you breathe in and out three times to help yourself get centred and re-focused.
There is also a scoring system at the end of a session that tells you how you did in that session. And naturally, there is a daily and weekly leaderboard that you can view when not in a session.
And that’s just scratching the surface.
There’s a reason when you sign up, Steven Puri begins sending out daily emails for two weeks outlining features about the app you might not be aware of.
But at the end of the day, all of these things are designed to make someone happier while working on a task. And there is a significant study that found when we are happier, we tend to work better. It’s something that I think a lot of companies and self-help gurus miss out on in certain cases.
We’re told to express gratitude on a regular basis, but some of us go about it in the wrong way. Or we focus on plenty of other things other than our work.
We’re told to hustle our hearts out. To be resilient, wake up at 5 a.m., and be a champion. That sort of rhetoric often doesn’t work, and the always be hustling mindset has it’s own inherent flaws. In fact, that talk tends to pile on more stress for us, which studies have found dampen our productivity.
All Sukha is designed to do is remove all of that noise and focus on one thing: start a task and get it done while being in an intensely focused space.
My Work Has Gotten Better, And Yours Can Too
Today, writing an article isn’t a three-hour slog fest for me. They no longer take up my entire morning or afternoon to produce one article. It doesn’t feel like a drag for me, and ultimately, it has helped me cut back on reading the article out loud multiple times while in the middle of writing it.
Between the music and the friendly community I engage with on occasion, it’s enough for me to improve my work and ultimately feel happier doing it again.
And its CEO understands how crucial that happiness is all about.
Between the quotes, inspirational videos that make you think, and the number of features this app has crammed into it (along with accessibility features to platforms like Discord, Slack, and social media sites and robust privacy features), lies a simple message:
Productivity isn’t just an end result. Productivity is a way to happiness.
-Steven Puri
I totally get that. For a lot of us we tend to just focus on the sense of accomplishment of finishing a task. Hustle bros focus so much on that culture and only hint once in a while about loving the process. But that’s not really ideal work.
What is ideal is being happy throughout the whole process. That you love the process and the results equally throughout.
And Sukha has helped facilitate that process.
Try Out This Productivity App
Through my experience over the past two free trial weeks and the weeks afterwards as a user, I can confidently share this app with others. It’s changed how my view my work and also how I get more done over the course of the day and the week.
Best of all, it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to get these benefits. Sukha only costs $13.33 per month for annual memberships and $20 per month for monthly plans.
I would be delighted to see you all over there so we can focus and get more work done. To sign up, click here for more details. And if you can see yourself using the app in the future, use the discount code ESBFLOW and you will get 20% for life.
To your growth!
Eric S Burdon