I personally find writing apps for myself to be a fun and practical way to learn. That way you might get introduced to a few libraries you've never used before - and get new codebases to dive into and learn from. I have friends who started programming with writing tools to mod games and IRC/Discord bots.

I've benefited a lot from the apps I've written to improve my day-to-day life.

Just to give you an example: I wrote a tool to sync my uni timetable from the proprietary system they're using to my Google Calendar - that way I have all my events in one place and I'm also notified of classes early enough so I can get to campus in time.