By Crissandra Ayroso
Has Daylight Savings thrown you off this week?
When it comes to managing your schedule as a student, it can be difficult enough to juggle all the demands and responsibilities, but one hour can be a complete nightmare. Fortunately, there are apps and tools available to help you stay organized, block distractions, and even offer creative ways to discourage you from hitting snooze on your alarm.
In addition to integral apps that are already a part of our daily routines not mentioned in the list below, like Google and Microsoft Suite apps, here are 11 more apps to boost productivity:
Any.do | Time manager with a distraction-free user interface
A clean, intently simple, well-designed task tracking and time management app that allows users to create categorized and sub-divided to-do lists. Perfect for those who are looking for a basic and distraction-free task management platform.
Stay Focused | Distraction blocker and annoyingly efficient
Stay Focused is an anti-distraction app that blocks apps and websites to help you… stay focused. Once you lock in your settings, the app makes it difficult for you to change your mind. You'll be required to replicate a long and complicated sentence - word for word - to make any sort of progress. Even a single mistake made will wipe out any progress made and force you to start from the very beginning.
Evernote | Digital day planner
Evernote is a versatile note-taking app that has progressed as a project organizational tool. Aside from taking great notes, you can plan projects, make to-do lists, and scan physical documents. On your phone, you can ask Siri or Ok Google to search, edit, and create notes for you.
FocusWriter | Plain, stripped-down writing program
FocusWriter is a distraction-blocking app designed to help you stay focused on the paper you're writing. It looks similar to a .txt file but has a more user-friendly interface and advanced features, like a timer and a daily goal function to set your word count goal. You'll get a notification as soon as you've fulfilled your objective, and keep track of your progress over time.
Alarmy | Alarm clock app for guilty snooze button pushers
It's an alarm clock, but it comes with a twist. To shut off the alarm, you need to accomplish various creative "missions": solve a puzzle or a math problem, scan a product's barcode you've registered to dismiss the alarm, capture a picture of the location you've registered to dismiss the alarm, engage in a memory game, or shake your smartphone up to 999 times.
Forest | Visual, interactive productivity app that plants trees in real life
Grow a tree in your app's forest while you focus on other tasks. Earn rewards by not using your phone. If you pick up your phone and leave the app, your tree dies! The creators of the app plant real trees worldwide, with over 1.5 million trees planted so far.
Tide | Mindfulness app through sleep, meditation, and focus reminders
Tide has a focus timer, meditation assistance feature, and soothing nature sounds to boost productivity. Tide is an effective tool to keep you productive and help you stay relatively stress-free.
Motion | Calendars, tasks, and meetings management
Motion is a time management tool that works like a personal assistant. It keeps your schedule on time with visual cues and even rebuilds your schedule when something unexpected happens.
Cold Turkey | Distraction blocking app that runs on a timer
Set a timer for as long as you want distracting websites, games, and apps to be blocked. Until the timer stops, there's no way to unblock the sites (that won't be more annoying than just staying focused).
Todoist | Time and task management
Todoist is a task management app that can be customized to organize to-do lists under different projects, create reminders, and set different priorities on your tasks. You can personalize your task views with Kanban-style cards.
If you're in school or working full time while taking an additional course, like a TEFL certification, at least one of these apps will make your day to day more efficient and less stressful. Which one will you try?