Now that most classes at WSU are being taught online I have found it harder for me to be productive with my schoolwork. Three of the hardest things I have come to realize with online school is that I am off task a lot, I struggle with taking notes, and I have trouble keeping all my work in order. In my time trying to learn how fix these things I found some good tools to help.
Staying On Task:
I often find myself on my phone when I am supposed to be focused on my class or just doing schoolwork itself. One of the best apps I found to help me put my phone down and focus is Forest. It is sort of like a little game where you try to grow a forest, but every time you use your phone your trees will die.
There is also your laptop to think about. Forest won’t help with a laptop, but Cold Turkey will. Cold Turkey is a browser extension you can download, and it will block any unnecessary websites for a specific amount of time that you choose. This app is great for doing homework or any other schoolwork you do in your free time.
Taking Notes:
I will admit I am horrible at taking notes. I rarely ever touch my notebooks because I just don’t take the notes. Evernote is a great app or browser extension you can download right to your laptop to help with your note taking. The best part of Evernote is that it has way more features then just note taking: you can also make to-do lists, get text from images, scan documents, and it allows you to take articles from the web or PDFs to make notes in the margins. This app is an all-around great resource to help you step up your note-taking game.
Organizing Schedules:
I always forget what assignments are due what days and what the assignments even are, but good thing there are apps to help me with that. Google Calendar and Microsoft To Do are great for organizing your life. Both of these websites allow you to organize your school by classes and with that you can mark when assignments are due with subtasks. Using these has helped me organize my school life and has taken a lot of unnecessary stress off of me.
There are many more productivity apps and browser extensions out there that work just as good. Don’t let your schoolwork get away from you, use these apps to manage it before it gets too late.
-Lucy LaValley ’21
