Reading books is the most reliable way to achieve personal and professional growth. Through reading, you can acquire new skills that can get you a promotion in your current job or place you in a better company. It also improves your language skills, thought process, brainstorming capabilities, and creativity.

Headway app helps you to consume ideas from books faster and filters out irrelevant content. Here are some of the Headway app features you can use.

What Is Headway?

Headway is an EdTech app. It helps you to grow your personality, negotiation, leadership, and technology skills scientifically. It offers you bite-sized book reviews that perfectly fit your workday routines, even when your calendar is full. The app motivates you to practice self-development just like a hobby in the following ways:

  1. It offers 15-minute book summaries on the world’s best nonfiction books.
  2. It provides educational and informative content in interesting ways. There are games in the form of audio, text, interactive challenges, and flashcards.
  3. For effective learning and recollection, the app utilizes the renowned spaced repetition feature.

You’ll get a 7-day free trial with full access on the first sign-up. Then, if you stay on the free plan, you’ll get one free book summary daily and 10 to 20 ideas as flashcards in text/audio formats.

However, you can also get an annual subscription for $89.99. There are monthly and quarterly subscriptions as well. It’s worth noting that the app is available in English and Spanish.

Download: Headway for Android | iOS (Free)

1. Book Summaries

Images showing the Discover section and book summaries

You can call book summaries a CliffsNotes version of the entire book. This concise synopsis of a book contains only the main ideas and a few quotes. So, instead of investing hours in reading a book and deciphering its learnings, you only need to invest 15 minutes.

Within this period of time, you learn everything the book has to offer. Additionally, there are audible book summaries in the Headway app. Therefore, you can also learn when you are on the go. You also don’t need the internet to consume book summaries, as you can download the content.

A team of experts consisting of editors, writers, voice actors, and moderators creates high-quality book summaries for the Headway app. It only keeps the thoughts and pieces that help you grow and filters out all the book's non-essential sections. Mostly, the book summaries contain five chapters.

The editorial team creates the book summary so that the reading or listening is fun-filled, interactive, and educational.

2. Customized Recommendations

Headway’s intelligent programming suggests the perfect book summary reads that help you to grow. At the set-up stage, you need to fill up a quiz about your goals. You can also choose which areas to improve.

The goals include choices like Win at work, Have more money, Be productive, etc. There are many areas that you can focus on. You can start with Leadership, Management, Planning, Time-management, and Communication.

From the available choices of goals and areas, you can choose multiple depending on your target. You’ll see a curated list of reading suggestions in the Today for you section of the app home screen.

3. Category Wise Learning

The Categories section of the app enables you to find book summaries based on 16 niches. The following are the trending ones that help you to advance your professional career:

1. Productivity

This niche focuses on productivity improvement at any stage and role of life. Whether you’re a full-time or freelance professional, you’ll find learning content that suits you. This section helps you to stop procrastinating and become more productive on your workdays.

2. Business & Career

This section focuses on educating you on skills relevant to the business. You might want to visit this section if you’re hoping to master the following skills:

  • Effective decision-making
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Business writing
  • Marketing laws
  • Competitive strategy

3. Society and Tech

You might want to visit this section to find book summaries, ideas, quizzes, and flashcards on social interactions and technological advancements. You may start with Because Internet or 21 Lessons For The 21st Century.

4. Leadership & Negotiation

If you need to advance your current career to a managerial level role, then you might want to pay attention to the content of the Leadership and Negotiation sections. These are two separate sections that help you to develop the following skills:

  • Becoming a manager
  • Coaching
  • Leadership
  • Difficult conversations
  • Trust

4. Spaced Repetition

It's a proven technique to memorize ideas or insights. The Headway app’s Repetition section stores flashcards. This section also trains you to practice the memorization technique cheerfully. You may try these steps:

  1. Open any book summary.
  2. In the top right corner, you’ll find a hamburger menu. Tap on it.
  3. Now, tap on the Insights section.
  4. Tap on the Remember icon beside any insight that you want to remember.
  5. Now go to the Repetition tab of the app.
  6. Tap on the Repeat cards button to start the spaced repetition quiz.

5. Read and Listen Anywhere

The app gives you limitless access to knowledge in the form of text and audio of book summaries. When you open any content, you’ll see a download icon in the top right corner. Tap on that to download the book summary when you’ve got internet.

When you're traveling or taking a meal break, you can listen to the book summary. When you no longer need the content, you can tap on the download icon again to delete it. It'll free up the internal storage of the smartphone.

6. Challenges

A visual showing Headway Challenges

The Collections section of the Headway app contains challenge-based book summaries. For example, you can begin a 28-day or 15-day challenge to pursue self-growth or healthy relationships.

This section is vital for those who want more constancy in learning. You may also challenge a friend or colleague to undertake the goal-based learning module. It'll give you the feel of thrill from the competition.

Related: Multimodal Learning Apps to Power Virtual Classrooms

7. Track Your Progress

You won’t get the feeling of achievement if you’re unable to look at a progress board. Headway understands that, and therefore it has an elaborate progress tracking section. To track your learning journey data:

  1. Tap on the Profile section of the app.
  2. You’ll see two dashboards, namely the Daily goal and My rating.
  3. The Daily goal card lets you adjust your goal or share data on social media.
  4. The My rating card shows your reading and learning performance in comparison to the Headway reader’s community.

Kickstart Your Personal Growth

The above-mentioned features of the Headway app make it a worthy tool for you if you’re too busy in your day-to-day schedule and can’t allocate time for self-improvement.

Whether you’re taking a 15 minutes break, commuting to and from the workplace, or stuck in traffic, you can use the app to learn productivity or leadership hacks. Also, there are other book summary apps that you can try out and choose the one that suits your style.