Finch app helps heel-draggers get dreaded tasks done

full black garbage bag beside closed white door

This app is cunning in a kind way. Slyly therapeutic, let’s say. It’s called Finch, and it gives you a baby bird* that grows, learns, and develops a personality insofar as you, the user, take care of yourself by setting small goals, achieving them, and reflecting on your progress and on your life. So for example let’s imagine that like me, you hate to take out the trash. You abhor it. You often have to fight with yourself for a few days before you’ll comply. But then also like me, you download Finch. You name your baby bird Toby, set a goal to take out the trash, and then when the time comes to do so, you find you cannot bear to neglect your duty. DO IT FOR TOBY, you think, girding yourself. And you take out the trash.

Remarkable.

WHO IT’S FOR

Now look: Some people are too level-headed, too firmly planted in reality to be emotionally manipulated this easily by what amounts to lines of code. Happily, I am not one of those people. If you are, Finch might not be for you. Congratulations and I’m sorry.

screenshots of Toby in the Finch user interface — What a handsome young man 😍

On the other hand, readers who just emitted an audible, “Awww,” are excellent candidates for successful Finch adoption.

WHAT IT DOES

On top of goal-setting, the app offers a profusion of self-care exercises to do, all of which help your bird grow. There are breathing exercises, soundscapes, and lots of prompts for introspecting. I love it all, and I’m glad it’s there, but I’m also aware that there are plenty of apps that offer similar self-care smorgasbords. None of those apps have Toby though, and Toby is the most important part. Toby gets me to take out the trash.

That’s partly because nothing happens to Toby if I don’t take out the trash. I’ve seen at least one app—a focus app, I think—that links user effort to something digitally “alive”—plants? fish, perhaps—but it does so in such a way that when you fail, which will always happen now and then, your plant or fish or whatever languishes and eventually dies. This functionality perplexes me; it creates a threat, which in turn adds stress, which can be motivating, no doubt, but surely not repeatedly over time? With Finch, my effort gives Toby energy, but my lack of effort takes none away. I’m free to be human.

WHY IT WORKS

And I don’t have to do more than I already need to do. Finch works for those it works for by giving us a wee digital life to care for, no labor required. A real bird creates additional work. Sadly, a whole lot of apps do the same. Whereas Toby merely augments the reward for typically high effort/low reward tasks that I need to do anyway.

I’ve found that particularly powerful with tasks that meet both of these requirements:

They tend to get put off.
They are truly tasks. No projects in disguise!

At work, almost all tasks nearer the end of a project than the beginning fall into this category for me, regardless of how easy they are. At home, it’s anything cooking/food prep related, garbage duty, and mail pick-up. Also phone calls. I personally get the best results when I only add one or two of these sorts of tasks as goals each day. Otherwise I risk resenting Toby. (Do I recognize the implicit lunacy of that statement? I do. It’s fine.)

TO FINCH OR NOT TO FINCH

Bottom line: If you struggle to get certain things done, and you’re capable (and not horrified at the thought) of forming something of an attachment to a digital character, Finch might be worth trying. You can do plenty with the free version, far more than I’ve come to expect from an app that offers a paid version, and both versions are ad-free. Refreshing, no?

* Surprisingly, Finch users aren’t all of one mind about what sort of bird their digital pet depicts. I assumed the obvious—a finch. But I’ve also seen owls, penguins, and chickens mentioned in reference to Finch. I think it’s a finch, but I also think it doesn’t matter.

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WHO IT’S FOR

WHAT IT DOES

WHY IT WORKS

TO FINCH OR NOT TO FINCH

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