Essential Productivity Apps for any student:
- Caffeine- Prevents your screen from going into sleep mode. Great if you’re writing notes on an article and the screen keeps dimming, whilst you hope that if you stare long enough, the phrase “homologous ways to a view of hegemony” will start to make sense.
- Flux- If you find that you can’t sleep for ages after studying late at night, then this app is a total game changer. It basically turns the light on the screen red, because science people say that blue light keeps you awake and red light doesn’t. (*Full Disclosure* I’m not a scientist)
- Focusbar- The annoying voice of your mother nagging you to finish your homework…in app form. You can set the annoying level (I have it set on “wildly annoying”) and a bar will appear in the corner every few seconds to remind you that you’re supposed to be doing something else besides looking at cat photos.
- Microsoft Office- self explanatory, so I’ve linked to an article about life hacks for Microsoft Office instead. Because I’m just that awesome.
- Nag- Does your 5 minute study break keep turning into an hour on Youtube? Then you need Nag in your life. It’s basically an alarm/timer. But an extremely loud and annoying alarm/timer that’s very difficult to ignore. The bells genuinely sound more judgemental the longer you ignore it.
- Self Control- Also known as Cold Turkey for Microsoft users. If you absolutely cannot be trusted with an internet connection, then you need Self Control in your life. You add a list of websites to the “blacklist”and then set how long you want the app to work for, and for that duration of time you wont be able to access those website. Seriously, not even rebooting your computer or uninstalling the app will let you access the blacklist until your time is up. Tough love at its finest.
- Zotero- The new love of my life. Zotero allows you to manage all your citations and sources in one easy place. It’s an absolute life saver- no joke. There’s an in-word add in, so it will write your bibliography and citations for you in any format you want. There’s a chrome/firefox add in and a mobile app, so you don’t even have to type the citation into Zotero. Just press the button it does all the hard work for you. It even updates itself online, so you can still access your bibliography if your computer crashes. I <3 Zotero 5eva.
I haven’t tried any of these, but they sound like they might be useful.