As students, we’re always looking for new ways to make our lives a little less demanding. One achievable way of doing this is by installing productivity apps, which are guaranteed to make your time at university much less stressful. What makes these apps even more student friendly is the fact that they’re all free!
1. Adobe Reader
Many modules at Lancaster Uni require us to read a variety of documents in preparation for our weekly seminars, which can make printing quite pricey. However, if you’ve got a tablet, then I’d highly recommend downloading Adobe Reader, which will allow you to save your required readings onto the app in a PDF format. With added tools such as highlighting and underlining, you’re basically enabled to annotate in the same way that you’d be able to with hard copied documents. Also, it’ll be so much more convenient, as it’ll mean that you’ll be able to view your documents everywhere, without the possibility of losing your work.
2. RefME
Aside from Adobe Reader, I consider this to be the most useful and time saving app for students, since all students are well aware of how much of a nightmare referencing can be. My friends and I generally agree on the fact that referencing will often take us more time to complete than the actual assignment itself. With RefME, however, the work is pretty much done for you. With over 6,000 styles of referencing to choose from, all you’re required to do is to scan the bar code of the book. You’d be a fool not to download this one!
3. Evernote
I find this app highly useful, as it enables you to not only produce hundreds of documents, but it also enables you to clip website articles, handwritten notes for when you have moments of academic inspiration. Astonishingly, it also saves you the time of compiling together slides, as with the click of a button, all of your selected notes are transformed into a Powerpoint. This app will ultimately save you a great deal of time and is available for phones, tablets and desktops.
4. Self-Control
When I discovered this app during my research online, I just had to recommend it. What is so awesome about this app is the mere fact that you can choose to temporarily block websites which you find really distracting, such as Facebook, Snapchat, and so on, while you plan to undertake some uni work. The amount of times that my friends have informed me that they’ve apparently “ been doing work in the library all day” only for me to discover that they’ve actually spent the majority of that time refreshing their Twitter page is both ridiculous and highly amusing. Ah, the perks of living in a highly technological age.
6. Post-it
And lastly, Post-it. I thought I’d save this one till last, since this app will unfortunately remind you of the dreaded upcoming exam season. However, despite the high forms of anxiety that you’re probably already experiencing, I honestly believe that this app will help to decrease stress levels, (if only a little bit) due to the simple fact that rather than spending money on countless amounts of sticky notes during your revision, this app will enable you to produce sticky notes electronically, meaning that not only will you save an insane amount of paper which you may be likely to lose, but you’ll also likely find it much handier, as you’ll effectively be able to revise anywhere.
