The new year means a fresh start, and for many, that means changing daily habits or setting goals. Even though the pressure to make and keep New Year’s resolutions can be daunting, small steps and changes can help set you up for however you define success in 2024.
Whether you are looking to prioritize more movement, to trade your daily social media scrolling habit for reading those books piling up, to cook more at home, or to travel to new places this year, we’ve rounded up some of the most common New Year’s resolutions and the gadgets that will help you actually keep them.
Also: Here’s everything you need to get organized this new year
Resolution: Fitness and movement
Resolutions and goals related to fitness are the most common type people make for the new year: According to a recent survey from Forbes, 48% of people say improving fitness is a top priority in 2024. But instead of starting to run three miles a day or hitting the gym every morning before work, you can start small. At-home equipment and fitness trackers make incorporating movement into your life that much easier.
Walking is one of the easiest ways to incorporate movement into your daily life, and a walking pad is a great solution to walking indoors. You can get your steps in during your work day with this under-desk treadmill that can easily be stored away when not in use. It has a maximum speed of six miles per hour and has a surprisingly quiet motor, so the machine won’t distract during work calls.
Plus, the LED display will help you get started on one of the 12 built-in programs.
The Apple Watch is undoubtedly one of the better smartwatches for fitness and health tracking, and the Series 9 comes with workout-specific features to help you reach your goals. Heart rate zones can be manually or automatically created through the Workout App using your personalized health data to monitor how intense a workout is.
Also: Apple Watch Series 9 vs Ultra 2: Which smartwatch should you buy?
There is also a Custom Workouts feature, which can be used to create a structured workout that can include work and rest intervals.
A smart workout mirror is truly an all-in-one piece of equipment that allows you to take any kind of exercise class from the comfort of your home. Live classes take place 24/7 each day, and you can also opt for on-demand content with more than 2,000 fitness classes you can take any time of day.
Classes include favorites like high-intensity interval training, core training, yoga, pilates, and kickboxing. Once you sync your phone or tablet to the mirror, you can start breaking a sweat right away. Plus, the mirror is Bluetooth compatible for easy operation.
Resolution: Read more
There’s nothing better than reading a good book that you can’t put down, but in the age of smart phones, many of us have forgotten that joy. If you want to trade your nighttime Instagram scrolling habit into something healthier, reading is a great option. There are more ways to read than ever before thanks to e-readers and audiobooks, so we’ve compiled some of the best products to help tackle your reading list this year.
The Kindle Oasis is the ultimate tablet for reading since it’s a high-tech device with features dedicated to enhancing your reading experience. It has adjustable warm light for comfortable reading at night and auto-adjusting light for when you’re reading in direct sunlight. Plus, it automatically rotates for page orientation, and it has physical page turn buttons to make flipping pages easier than ever.
It’s also waterproof, so you can read by the pool or in the bath without worrying about stray splashes.
Not a fan of Kindles? This Kobo e-reader has many of the same features as the Kindle Oasis, including page-turning buttons, 32GB of storage, waterproof, and an e-ink screen, plus the addition of ComfortLightPro blue light reduction technology to limit eyestrain. The Kobo Libra 2 is also cheaper at $190, instead of the Kindle Oasis’ $250.
Kobo offers more than 5 million e-book titles to choose from, including audiobooks. You can also borrow books from your local library.
If decision fatigue is what’s keeping you from reading, this book subscription service does the work for you and picks a different book each month for you to read based on your personal tastes. Book of the Month lets you choose one of five fiction/nonfiction books per month, so that you can add to your growing home library. The service has an emphasis on early releases and debut authors.
Plus, each book comes as a hardcover — so if you prefer reading an actual book in your hands over using an e-reader, this is a great option.
Resolution: Cook meals at home
Another popular resolution is improving your diet, with Forbes’ survey finding that 32% of people have make that their goal for 2024. Part of improving your diet means ditching the takeout and cooking more at home. You don’t have to be Gordon Ramsey to make a decent meals in your kitchen, and there are plenty of smart kitchen tools to help make dinner easy (and faster).
An Instant Pot is a staple in every modern kitchen, and it will help you be able to make virtually any meal at home. The device can serve the typical role of a pressure or slow cooker, but there are also exclusive functions like sous vide, yogurt maker, and more. You can use your phone to control the unit and use Wi-Fi to connect to the Instant Brands Connect app.
Also: The best Instant Pots
The app has over 2,000 smart recipes that you can click on, and the Instant Pot will start heating up to the proper heat and setting.
This smart scale is perfect if you’re trying to be more conscious of your fat, carb, or calorie intake since it analyzes the food on the scale to provide a detailed report of its macros. The scale used the Renpho Health App, which can sync to Apple Health or the Gennec app.
You can also easily convert measuring units from grams to ounces or ml to fluid ounces without doing mental gymnastics.
A sous vide is an easy way to cook meat, and this this gadget takes the traditional sous vide up a notch with the Anova app to set the time and temperature of your device. Its technology circulates water at a precise temperature to cook your meat exactly how you like it, whether medium rare or medium well.
It has 100 watts of power and a flow rate of 8 liters per minute, making it heat water faster so you can eat your dinner more quickly.
A meal kit delivery service is a great way to start cooking at home more, since it delivers all the pre-measured ingredients and recipes to your door. HelloFresh’s simple recipes don’t require professional cooking skills to complete: the service lets you choose between different meal preferences such as meat and veggies, family-friendly, fit and wholesome, and quick and easy, as well as different dietary options like salt conscious, carb smart, or high protein, so there is literally something for everyone.
What’s great about HelloFresh is that if you are a first-time user, there are discount codes that can get you up to five boxes (five weeks of meals) at a highly discounted price ($28).
Resolution: Travel to new places
If you’re one of the lucky ones with generous or even unlimited paid time off, you should be taking it as much as possible. Get out of your comfort zone in 2024 by visiting new places, whether it’s that national park you’ve been meaning to check out or a different country you’ve always dreamed of visiting. Even though planning a trip and making the trek can be daunting, we’ve rounded up some useful tools and gadgets to make your travels easier this year.
To make your 2024 trips as seamless and efficient as possible, you’ll need a trip planner. Guide is an AI travel planning tool that helps you create personalized itineraries based on your trip preferences. (Full disclosure: It’s also ZDNET’s sister brand. It’s currently in private beta, but you can join a wait list.) Once you create an account, you can input your travel details, and Guide will generate a customizable schedule for your desired trip, with hotel, restaurant, activity, and attraction suggestions.
You can modify Guide’s suggested itinerary to your liking by adding new activities and restaurants or by moving current suggestions around.
If your trips will be taking you internationally, you’ll need a plug adapter. This all-in-one adapter will give you power in over 150 countries due to its four different plugs and can charge your phone, laptop, and headphones all from the same spot. Just pick which of the USB-A, USB-C, and AC options you’d like to use and plug up to six devices to simultaneously charge from the adapter.
Keep in mind this adapter is not a voltage converter and only holds up to 240 volts. This means you should not use this adapter with items such as your hair dryer, straightener, or others.
One of the only downsides of traveling is the actual travel part, and to make your flights more enjoyable (and more quiet) you’ll need to invest in a good pair of noise-canceling headphones. If you want to cancel out all noise throughout your flight or simply play music for hours on end, Bose’s QC Ultra gives you the utmost comfort with “clear, balanced, and detailed” sound quality, as described by ZDNET’s headphones expert Jada Jones.
Plus, their battery life lasts 24 hours (or 18 with ANC and Immersive Audio on), which is plenty of time even for those long international flights.
Review: Bose QuietComfort Ultra: A rightful heir to the ANC throne
You might also need…
No matter what your resolutions are this year, a little help and motivation from external sources is always a good thing. Here are a few other products we recommend checking out to keep you on track this year.