College is where most individuals start exploring anything and everything they have ever wanted to. What this means is that every college student must optimize for time. Why? Because the time saved could be used to either explore their hobby/interests or even just hang out more with friends. Why would you want to waste your time doing something for 10 hrs when you could do the same task in 5 hrs without compromising the quality of your work?
Obviously, we aren’t going to give you some magic tricks to help you complete your work quickly, but instead, we will talk about five tools that might help you do so. Of course, you need to work hours to achieve your goals. But sometimes, it’s not up to how much effort you put, but what tools you have at your disposal.
Here is a list of 5 tools in no particular order.
Todoist
All of us have only 24 hours in a day. What matters is what we can accomplish in these 24 hours. To achieve the most, we must be 100% present when we have a task in hand. The key is to define your goals and get started. Make to-do lists. Lists break tasks down into manageable chunks.
Todoist is a task management application that helps manage your personal and professional productivity. At its core, Todoist is a task management application that allows you to manage your personal and professional productivity. It has the power to control any set of tasks, deadlines, and reminders. And it also has a premium version that enables collaboration with other team members.
Todoist features
- Quick Add — lets you capture and organise tasks in seconds
- Recurring due dates
- Sections and substacks
- Prioritising, favourites and reminders available
- Delegate tasks and get notifications
- Personalise your task views with labels, filters, boards, and themes
- See tangible progress with productivity visualisation and activity history
If something catches your interest, there’s probably something to it. Pocket offers a save button for the internet, and the Pocket app helps you save anything from across the web in a distraction-free space for you to focus and let the ideas flow.
Pocket features
- Pocket’s listen feature turns any news story, article, or blog post into a hands-free, eyes-free learning experience.
- Resources can be viewed even when you’re offline.
- Estimates reading time.
- Pocket Premium offers features like advanced search, unlimited highlights and automatic article backups.
Zuperly is a learner-centric unified hub for all your learning and productivity needs. It helps you organise, collaborate, and analyse your learning all in one place. Right now, the entire learning stack is fragmented and scattered across several platforms, which makes us hop between multiple platforms leading to loss of productivity and time due to context switching. Zuperly offers the convenience of having all the tools in one place.
Here’s why you should use Zuperly for learning, improving productivity, getting motivation, staying focused, connecting with experts/authors, networking with people from your industry, etc.
The toolkit consists of
Pathways — Go deeper on relevant topics and explore collections of related content to gain knowledge at your own pace. Discover sequential learning experiences with the help of these richly curated pathways. On a very simple note, pathways are a guided collection of books, articles, blogs, tools, tests, videos, podcasts, and discussion forums on a particular topic, all curated and organised under one platform for easy reference.
Coursestack — You can organise all the online courses you are currently enrolled in and not only set milestones for those courses and complete them with your “study buddies”. Learners can create study buddy groups which is as easy as making a WhatsApp group with their friends and sharing learning resources online with coursestack.
Zuperlyst — With Zuperlyst, curating links to important resources available online is as easy as creating a Spotify playlist with your favourite songs.
Superspace — is a powerful note-taking tool embedded into the Zuperly feature set. It can be grouped with the Calendar to form the most powerful sync up when it comes to the productivity aspect of Zuperly.
Flashcards — An incredibly versatile study/practice tool. It gives the brain a quick way to check if you got the correct answer or understood the concept. It’s like grading your work, and this self-reflection improves memory. Flashcards are basically small note cards where users can write information in a concise way. Flashcards are typically two-sided, with the prompt on one side and the information about the prompt on the other. This may include names, vocabulary, concepts, or procedures.
Pomodoro -Managing time and completing tasks is often tricky. People race against time to tick things off the list (especially when there are deadlines), which leads to a lot of stress. The Pomodoro Technique helps you resist all of those self-interruptions and re-train your brains to focus. Each Pomodoro is dedicated to specific tasks, and each break is a chance to reset and bring your attention back to what you should be working on.
Habit Tracker — Unlike a simple to-do list or a goal tracker, habit tracking can be used to build new habits or break bad habits. Habit trackers allow you to become more mindful of your behaviours and encourage consistency and self-accountability. The user selects a recommended habit /creates a habit and sets the number of days they will consciously try to build that habit. Every day, the user marks the habit as complete if done. This allows users to track their progress and check how diligently they have been trying to create that habit. The tracker also shows users their habit streak (successive days they completed a routine) and days that they missed.
Goal-o-meter — Setting goals don’t mean a thing if you don’t give it your everything to complete them or at the very least move towards them. Knowing what tools to use can save you a ton of time and energy. You just have to set your goals; Zuperly will assist you with what tools/features you should use to accomplish them.
Spark- Find your to-do list, Pomodoro, and quick notes at your fingertips. Spark is accessible throughout the platform, making it easier to navigate between features. Small things like this make all the difference while learning!
Google docs
Google Docs is a free web-based tool that allows you to create, edit, and store documents and spreadsheets online. Any device with an Internet connection can access the files. Google Docs is well-suited to collaborative projects in which numerous authors collaborate in real-time from geographically dispersed places. Everyone in the room can see who made specific document modifications and when they were made.
Google Docs users may combine text with formulae, lists, tables, and photos to create, edit, and update documents and spreadsheets in a variety of fonts and file formats.
Google docs features
- Different document templates
- Voice typing
- Collaborate with your peers
Google Keep
Google Keep is a collaborative application that allows users to take plain-text notes then organise, edit, and share them with others. You don’t need to carry a notebook everywhere anymore because we now have smartphones with features that provide limitless possibilities. It’s a great tool for jotting down all of those random thoughts and ideas.
Google Keep features
- Voice notes
- Draw a note
- Add notes to images
- Add reminders
Are you preparing to go to college and searching for what you should be doing with your time there? We highly recommend you check out all the tools we’ve mentioned today. These tools could save you a ton of time that could be used to explore your other interests! Sometimes, the tools you use could make all the difference.
Varun, Content Writer
