5 apps to stay on track this year
Your smartphone can be a tool or a distraction.
The school year is right around the corner and a lot of students are getting ready to get back to the grind. For most students this means late nights, long assignments, and loads of coffee. Student life is a balance between social life, school work, and for some, trying to make some money to help pay for tuition.
To help you balance it all, here are some apps that will help you stay organized and motivate.
5. Focus Keeper: Work & Study Timer
Memes. They are everywhere. Staring you in the face saying, “Come look at me, come look at me. Don’t worry about your assignment you can do it later.”. If you are like me at all you have fallen victim to meme addiction once in your life. This is detrimental to your studies and your motivation!
I may have a solution. Have you ever heard of Pomodoro? No, not the tomato based sauce but the technique that helps increase productivity.
The basic idea is to work four, twenty-five-minute intervals separated with a five-minute break. After the fourth interval you take a twenty–thirty-minute break. The idea was named after the tomato timer in Francesco’s kitchen in university where he called each interval a Pomodoro (Tomato).
Focus Keeper: Work&Study Timer allows you to follow the Pomodoro technique flawlessly while tracking your progress over a thirty day chart. You also can set daily goals which may motivate you to complete another focus session.
Overall I intend to use this app in the upcoming year and in today's world where memes are just a click away it may be useful to keep you on track and not lost in the depths of Youtube or Facebook.
4. Slack
Everyone loves group projects. Especially all the confusion and unfair work distribution that comes with it. A lot of this stress is a result of poor communication.
Thankfully, there’s an app for that: Slack is a great app for orchestrating group projects. It allows for private group messaging as well as one-on-one messaging. You can also make teams for different projects or organizations. Within these teams there are channels which can represent different tasks within the same project.
This is an excellent way to make sure you are communicating with the right team when you need to be. There is also 5 GB of storage that is free to use with the app for file sharing. If this is not enough, worry not because slack allows you to integrate with other file-sharing services such as google drive or Dropbox.
3. LinkedIn
The importance of networking for the career-focused student is paramount. And it makes sense to develop a profile strictly for professional networking. LinkedIn is the app for this. Your profile an online resume filled with your information along with work experience, honours, and awards.
Once you have a profile the networking can begin. Profiles of people you may know will be available for you to connect with. Even if you don’t have a lot of work experience, growing your network, adding new skills and checking out job postings is a good way to get into the career mindset.
Don’t forget, recruiters use LinkedIn to find potential candidates to hire so it’s important to start growing your connections as soon as you can.
Students at the Lassonde School of Engineering are lucky because most of our lectures are recorded. For the less fortunate there are numerous apps that accomplish this task. Lecture Monkey is more than just a lecture recording app. It creates crowd sourced slide shows of everything that went on in class. Taking images, annotations and edits from all participants in the class then shares it amongst them.
Students don’t get enough sleep. Yes, it requires discipline and time management, but there’s also an app for that.
You could do as Arnold Schwarzenegger said “you need 8 hours? Just sleep faster!” OR you can use a smart alarm clock to help you sleep smarter.
The Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock analyzes your sleep and wakes you up during your lightest portion of sleep. This is done using sound and vibration technology. All you do is place your phone near your bed or on the floor. This is especially useful for those nights you have to manage your time with assignments, social life and everything else.
Finally, there is no one app or magic trick that will help you be more organized and stay on track. There are lots of great resources (some of them are apps) that will help you throughout the year — you just have to take
With hard work and excellent time allocation there is no reason why you won’t be successful Good luck everyone!
