New year, new me

gm legends and welcome back to the final edition of the Leaderboard for 2024. In the spirit of celebrations we're taking a look back at some of our favorite products that could help you smash those 2025 goals. Let's dive in.

Blitzit: A simple to-do list and timer for peak productivity. 

I’ve tried dozens of productivity apps and I alwas go back to creating to-do lists in Apple Notes. The big reason why is because too many of these apps are so complicated that productivity becomes secondary to the app itself. Blitzit is different. The team have struck a sweet spot between having a solid feature set and keeping it simple. It breaks your day down into lists with each task having a timer. While you work, you can add notes, take breaks, and enter “focus mode” — a reduced interface to be less distracting. Now, if it could just do my tasks for me while I catch up on my reading list that would be great.

Git Skyline: A 3D visualization of your Git contributions

It’s like we’re turning everything into a scoreboard these days, and GitHub is no different. Tracking those green contribution squares and showing off our commits on stuff like the sold-out DeskHub has become its own kind of humblebrag. Now, Git Skyline is taking that obsession to the next level, turning each of our commits into a 3D mini-skyscraper—like building a little city out of code. But as we watch our work morph into these shiny badges of productivity, it kind of makes you wonder: are we actually committing to meaningful code, or just stacking up progress points for the sake of it?

Topics: Personalized Spanish practice for intermediate learners.

Anyone who’s seriously tried to learn a language knows Duolingo can’t take you very far beyond A1, so I’m glad to see Topics is focusing on gamifying the (much trickier) intermediate stage. The app currently only supports Spanish and the free practice texts are limited, but I think the overall concept of presenting readers with narrated, level-appropriate blurbs is pretty good. But what's really missing for a lot of plateaued intermediate learners is intense speaking and writing practice — neither of which the app currently targets.