The Last Day of the Holiday: 16 Apps to Help You Recharge | The No-Pep-Talk Spring Festival Guide

Over the past few days we've handed out twelve guides to help you try something new. Today, with the holiday balance running low, you may need more than a little inspiration for enjoying the moment — you need methods you can use right away, something to give yourself a shot of adrenaline.

Don't Be Afraid — What's Coming Will Come Anyway!

The end of the year is never easy:

You face the attention of relatives and friends carrying guilt over wasted time, hope for the future, and unease about the world.

Don't force yourself to put on a positive front, and don't agonize over it either. Accept what you can't manage right now — it's rare to get to switch off completely, and how you feel matters more than anything else.

This is the last installment of our Spring Festival edition of Hack Your Life. Over the past six days we've offered two things a day — not to help you pick up some future skill, not to feed you inspirational platitudes, just to get you to try something new and see whether it brings a little inspiration for enjoying the present.

With one day of the holiday left, today we want to help you — and help the person typing this — do a bit of mental preparation. "After the New Year" is a magical phrase: whenever you don't feel like starting a new project at year's end, or haven't finished an old one, you want to put it off until "after the New Year."

The scary part is that this "after the New Year," which has fended off at least a hundred thorny tasks for us, is tomorrow.

It seems we've once again reached the time of year that demands the most drive and courage. We've put together some tools and methods that might help — at least enough to give you the ritual feeling of "I'm ready to go back to work."

Happy New Year — get moving in the Year of the Rooster, and go easy on the pep talks!

From tomorrow, at least, Cuihua, Erniu, and Daniu turn back into Fiona, Jessica, and Simon. The annual "symposium" where every aunt and uncle grills the unmarried about being single, and the yearly showdown between everyone's unruly kids, are over too. Life and work simply go back to running the way they do the other 360 days of the year — aside from the extra ten jin (about five kilos) you've put on, it's as if the guilt-free relaxing and laziness of the holiday never happened.

Right now we don't care how your New Year's reading plan or your goal of keeping a regular schedule turned out. We just want to help you get a relatively easy start to post-holiday life.

Wishing you happiness.

Cover image from Visual Hunt and Giphy; the GIFs in the body are from Giphy.

A Sincere Reminder: Drink More Water | WaterMinder, Heshuibao

"Drink more hot water," that all-purpose line, is useless in most situations.

But on your first day back at work after the holiday, if you're feeling out of sorts, taking a sip of water to catch your breath for a moment can still help.

WaterMinder (iPhone | Android) records how much water you drink each day. If you fall short of a preset goal or forget to log a glass, it pops up a message: drink some water, take a break!

The first time you open it, WaterMinder calculates how much water you should drink per day from your age, gender, weight, and the temperature around you — though you can also adjust it by hand.

The app comes with three cup sizes — small, medium, and large — for 250 ml, 350 ml, and 500 ml. On the home screen, a little figure fills up with water as you drink. You can also check your water intake in Apple's built-in Health app. Keep logging for a few days and you'll earn achievement badges.

If Android users have trouble installing WaterMinder, try Heshuibao (Android), which any app store will turn up. It works much the same way, with even more cup sizes to choose from.

Clear Your Head and Make a Work Plan | Taskcode, iOS Notes

Not many people can cut ties with work entirely over the holiday. Your work email, your team's WeChat group, Slack channel, or DingTalk group all hold a few items you agreed to "move forward" or "discuss" once the New Year holiday is over.

Spending a little time in advance to rank the work that piled up over the holiday, and to think through how to tackle it, might spare you from being caught off guard at the morning meeting on the first workday of the Year of the Rooster.

List Your To-Dos Like You're Writing Code | Taskcode (iPhone)

We've covered plenty of apps that help with work planning: Mindnode (iOS | Mac), which sorts out your thoughts with mind maps; iThoughts (iOS | Mac), which lets you schedule while you think; Android users can also try Minjet For Android and Mindly; and if your workload isn't heavy, Any.do is enough on its own.

Taskcode lets you write your to-do list like code. Spend two minutes learning the basic syntax and you can build a clean, readable schedule with it. A " " marks a title, # marks a date, @ marks a specific delivery time — in short, you put simple symbols in front of the text to format it. Once you get the hang of this Markdown-like system, it isn't hard at all.

If You'd Rather Not Fuss With Tools, the Notes App Built Into iPhone and Mac Will Do

Once you've upgraded to iOS 9 or later, Apple's built-in Notes app already handles quick notes, checklists, and sharing with a team.

While writing a note, tap the checkmark button in the bottom left and a list becomes an interactive checklist. Anything unclear can be filled in with a sketch or a photo. Thanks to iCloud syncing, every iPhone, iPad, and Mac signed into the same iCloud account keeps the task list up to date — sort out your thinking on your phone on the way to work, then open it on your computer once you're in the office and cross items off one by one.

If your setup is an Android phone plus a Windows PC, Wunderlist, which runs on every platform, might help: a simple way to manage work and life in one app.

Did the Lucky Money and Red Envelopes Balance Your Books? | YNAB

There are too many places money can disappear to. If you've worked for years and your income has risen quite a bit, but you still have no savings and no investments, you may need to rein in your spending.

Keeping accounts — working out where your money actually goes — helps. Alipay and NetEase Youqian both offer solutions like this.

But to fix the root problem, you still need a budget.

Back when there were no smartphones and credit cards weren't yet common, there was a plain method of budgeting: after getting paid each month, you'd stuff cash into different envelopes marked rent, food, electricity. If the money in one envelope vanished too fast, you noticed in time and adjusted.

Credit cards, Alipay, and WeChat made all of this more complicated.

YNAB (short for "You Need a Budget") is a budgeting tool built for this era. Each month you set budgets by category for the next 30 days of spending. It runs on Android, iOS, and the web.

It splits spending into two main kinds. The first is everyday expenses paid out one at a time, like meals and cab rides, which come up every month and stay fairly steady.

The second is long-term expenses, the main cause of deficits — a gym membership you pay for a year at a time, rent paid three months at a time, a trip to Antarctica over the National Day holiday.

Once you've paid, the following month often feels easier. That feeling is an illusion: the right way to budget is to spread these big expenses across a full-year plan. Otherwise you end up applying for credit-card installments and paying steep fees (calculated by the year, no bank's credit-card installment fee is really the single-digit percentage its wordplay-laden disclosures make it sound like).

YNAB breaks these expenses down by month. Rent of 15,000 yuan due every three months becomes a 5,000-yuan monthly budget; the app accumulates that money and deducts it all at once when payment falls due. Keep your books this way and you won't get the illusion that you have cash to spare in a month when no rent is due.

Beyond the budgeting mechanism, YNAB is worth recommending for how thorough it is. For each category you can set next month's target, track money moving between credit and debit cards, and set up recurring income and expenses. Use only the basic features and you can still budget well; want to dig deeper, and YNAB has dozens of videos explaining every detail of budgeting.

As for the downsides: after a 34-day trial, YNAB costs $50 a year. But if your financial problems are bigger than $50, it's still worth using to train your spending habits.

Other inconveniences include the lack of a native Mac app — you're stuck with the web version. Fortunately the web version works well and handles keyboard shortcuts nicely, so efficiency isn't a problem.

It also can't hold more than one currency in a single ledger. That's probably not a big deal, since more and more domestic credit cards now bill overseas spending directly in yuan. But if a purchase isn't recorded in yuan automatically, or if you also have a non-yuan account to manage, you'll have to do the conversion yourself, which is a nuisance.

Three Ways to Vent on a Whim: Text, Photos, Video | To Me, Kala Ouke, Vue

We first wanted to recommend some tools to help you keep a record of the year ahead. But just thinking about keeping it up, only to find a blank page again at year's end, is stressful enough on its own.

Our best wish for the first week back at work is simply this: whenever you feel like venting, you can.

Whatever's on Your Mind, Tell It Anytime

To Me (iPhone) is an extremely simple notebook. A big smiley face fills the screen; tap it and you can start writing. There's nothing to it besides typing.

It feels a bit like venting to a real person — as you type, the stress may ease. Or it could backfire: staring at that smiley face makes you angrier, and suddenly you're spoiling for a fight.

That's not a bad thing either, right?

Whatever's Bothering You, Sing It Out!

Kala Ouke (iPhone) is a small tool for adding song lyrics to photos; its name is a homophone of "karaoke." Pick a picture, add a couple of lines, and you're done. Android users can find similar features in photo-editing apps.

Kala Ouke offers four lyric styles to choose from, and if you can't think of lyrics to match your photo, you can just use one of these five preset sets.

Like Zuji, the app that had its moment a year earlier, Kala Ouke can make a casual snapshot look like a still lifted from a music video. In truth you can put anything you like in the two lines of "lyrics" — music videos these days contain just about everything, and that lyric font gives a photo a certain ceremonial air.

Photos Aren't Enough? Make a Video

Whatever clips you shot casually over the New Year holiday can be edited with VUE (iOS | Android).

Add a filter, drop in a caption, pick a sticker from the built-in set, and in under half a minute you've cut together a little story — easy to share to Moments, too.

The World Wasn't Very Calm Over the Holiday, and It Won't Be Later Either | Digg

Over this past holiday, the world has not in fact been very calm.

Check the news and you may snap right out of holiday mode. But browse a few news-aggregation sites and it's hard to escape the mood people call "sang," a kind of listless despondency — which is when you need a tool to manage the information you take in.

For now, machines still may not understand what your "reading interests" really are, so you might subscribe to news by RSS according to your own interests instead. Most news sites have their own RSS feed link. The method is simple: find the RSS link for the site you want, and add it to an RSS reader such as Digg (iOS | Android).

Once you've added your feeds, you can see everything you subscribe to updating in real time inside Digg Reader.

The advantage is that you get to choose for yourself which outlets — the ones whose filtering you trust — feed you information.

On how to see the world a little less one-sidedly, we once put together a special feature; if you're interested, head over and read it: When Tech Companies Decide What You See Every Day, How Do You Keep Your Perspective From Being Boxed In by Algorithms? Ten Ideas | Hack Your Life

A Few Light Games for the Commute Back to Work | OPUS, Tap Tap Fish

Work starts again, and in our experience the games that roll out special New Year levels, items, or festive editions lose their upside the moment the holiday ends: being reminded at your desk of all that bustling and eating and drinking is not a good thing.

We guarantee that neither of the two games we're recommending today contains a single rooster, a string of firecrackers, or a New Year poster baby!

Into the Sea of Stars | OPUS: The Day We Found Earth

OPUS: The Day We Found Earth (iPhone | Android) is a science-fiction adventure game made by a Taiwanese developer. The story takes place aboard the deep-space probe Opus, in a future where humanity has migrated deep into the universe and Earth has become an ancient legend. You have to find Earth somewhere in the vast sea of stars in order to complete a missing fragment in the genes of future humans.

In the game you play OP1414-Emeth, a small robot handed a single goal by Dr. Lisa: find Earth. This little game even takes up the question of what divides humans from robots. "That way you're no longer a machine — because you've been given a purpose, you're a person," the doctor says.

We suggest playing with headphones on. Besides the warm storyline and the dazzling starscapes, the sound design the developer worked over so carefully is another high point. Losing yourself in the cosmos before work might help you forget for a while how tense it feels to deal with other humans again.

Dive Into the Deep Sea | Tap Tap Fish

Tap Tap Fish: Deep Sea Aquarium (iPhone | Android) was originally called AbyssRium, a collect-and-nurture game.

At the center of the screen sits a starter coral rock; tap it over and over and you earn life energy, which you spend on upgrading the coral and, more to the point, on buying all kinds of sea creatures.

The reason for recommending this game is simple: an aquarium is a place that eases stress to begin with. Tap Tap Fish simulates a soft, gorgeous undersea world, and just watching the fish is enough to lift your mood.

If you have a Cardboard-style VR headset lying around, slot your phone in and you can visit the aquarium in virtual reality.

If Exercise Feels Like a Chore, Just Go for a Run | Nike Run Club

Under cover of "it's New Year, after all," the foods you'd normally never dare eat, or never dare eat much of, ended up in your stomach before you knew it. Don't worry — as long as you get moving, putting on weight isn't that easy.

We've covered plenty of apps that let you quietly work on your body fat at home: Keep (iPhone | Android), which offers video instruction; Nike Training (iPhone | Android), with its high-definition slideshows; and 7M Workout (iPhone | Android), which gets your fat burning in seven minutes.

A friend who has worked through all sorts of exercise-based stress relief gives this advice: don't get stuck doing homework on the subject. Rather than studying a dozen methodologies, start with the simplest thing — if the air quality allows, put on a pair of proper shoes and go downstairs and run. Once the habit has more or less taken hold, then you can worry about whether running thickens your calves, or how to stretch so your legs don't ache the next day.

I picked Nike+ Run Club (iPhone | Android) to log my mileage from here on. It hooks straight into the music app on your phone, so pressing start also starts the music, and you can watch your running data update in real time — though honestly, once you're running, just run and leave the phone alone.

Wherever you're starting from, get out there and run.

Your Next Trip Isn't Far Off — Start Planning Now | Qyer Trip Planner, Google Trips

If you've already settled where you're going on your next holiday, you can start building the guide whenever you feel low.

Think about it: a few more weeks at work and you'll be off travelling again. Doesn't that give you something to look forward to?

Qyer Trip Planner (iPhone | Android)

Founded ten years ago, Qyer.com has gathered destination guides, travelogues, and Q&As from all over the world.

Qyer Trip Planner (iPhone | Android) is Qyer's trip-planning app. Set your destination, dates, and budget, and it generates an itinerary for you.

Every itinerary card can be fine-tuned further on your own, and when you reach a given stop, you can tap "Next Stop" to see nearby restaurants and sights.

The most useful feature is the ask-for-directions card. Mispronounce a foreign place name and even the friendliest passerby will struggle to help you. All the trouble of pointing at the fine print in a guidebook to ask a café waiter the way is solved by this card.

Google Trips (iPhone | Android)

If you book overseas hotels, flights, or attraction tickets, you'll probably get a confirmation email for each. And if you happen to use Gmail, Google Trips can serve as your smart travel assistant.

Google Trips (iPhone | Android) is a trip-management app Google released recently. It gathers the flight and hotel details already on your phone, builds a route and saves it in advance, and maps out sightseeing stops and timings for you.

Besides letting Google Trips scan your inbox for bookings and generate a basic itinerary, you can search a destination directly to find out what there is to see and do there.

Every location's itinerary and guide can be downloaded for offline use, so even if you've just landed in a new city and can't get online, you won't be lost.

At each destination, based on the length of stay you set, the app recommends day plans. If you've booked a bus arriving Monday and a flight leaving early Thursday, Google Trips reads those two confirmation emails and maps out a 72-hour sightseeing route.

Eight Straight Workdays Ahead — Get a Good Night's Sleep Tonight | Jingyin, Alarmy

Over the past few days you've had a run of sleeping until you woke up on your own, and your parents probably nagged you for staying up late and sleeping in. With a long stretch of workdays ahead, the first thing to do is reset your body clock to nine-to-five.

Otherwise, unable to sleep at night and unable to get up in the morning, by next week you'll turn into this before it's even time to clock out:

Listen to Some Natural Sounds and Sleep a Little Better | Jingyin (iPhone)

We know sleep helps the body recover from a day's fatigue and lets us concentrate better the next day. But there's another law of sleep: the more you need to fall asleep early, the harder it is.

Much like watching a video of a fireplace burning all night, playing the sound of wind through a forest on your phone relaxes you and helps you drift off.

Jingyin (iPhone) has one big play button as its main screen. Turn the dial and you can switch between and mix six kinds of sound — forest, light rain, thunderstorm, bells, wind, and ocean waves — to make the white noise that puts you to sleep best.

You could also try Rain Rain (iPhone), which offers dozens of kinds of rain; Android users can try Muji to Relax. Beyond using it when you can't sleep, you can listen to natural sounds to unwind whenever you feel too anxious.

One app may not be enough. On how to sleep well we once put together a special feature — if today's fix isn't enough and you want to know more, click the link with the yellow underline:

"Hack Your Life": Stop Sleeping In — These 10 Apps Help You Forget Spring Festival and Get Back to Waking Up Early. Sleep Well Tonight

Remember to Set Your Alarm | Alarmy (iPhone | Android)

Alarmy's name comes with a line in parentheses: "Sleep if you can." The official Chinese name is blunter, roughly "Sleep My Ass Alarm." But if you can still fall back asleep after going through the steps it takes to turn an Alarmy alarm off, all we can do is take our hats off to you.

Never mind the basic repeat-every-few-minutes setting. To turn the alarm off, you can choose to retake a photo from the same angle you shot the night before, or shake your phone hard for 30 seconds. If that's still not enough, you can solve a few maths problems that take a few seconds of mental arithmetic — and while you're fumbling to open the calculator on your phone, the alarm keeps ringing.

To keep you from oversleeping, we've made plenty of recommendations before: Rocket Alarm Clock (iPhone | Android), which won't let you off until you've cleared five mini-games in a row; Awake (iPhone), which rouses you with the spiritual force of a poem; and Sleep Circle, which monitors your sleep so it can wake you during a light-sleep phase. But if none of them feels like a sure thing, we'd suggest calling on your mother — she's up early exercising anyway — for a loving barrage of wake-up calls. Shameful, maybe, but it works.