Time to manage your time management skills

One of the biggest problems that students often face is keeping a handle on everything that you need and want to do and making sure that you don’t miss anything. With this in mind, here’s a list of three apps that could help you out… by Chris Vernon

Being at university is an exciting time! You’re embarking on a new chapter in your life, maybe you’ve moved from another city or another country, you’re meeting new people and doing new things. It can be exciting, eye-opening and, if I’m being honest, a bit overwhelming (it often feels that way to me and I’ve been here eight years!).

There are a few things you can do to make your life less overwhelming. Some of them are quite simple such as keeping track of engagements, deadlines and events. How you do this is up to you: some people keep a diary, some have a big calendar on their wall, some people keep reminders in their phone.

Regardless, almost everyone will have to evaluate all the jobs they have to get done based on how urgent and time consuming they will be so that all tasks can be prioritised accordingly. In order to accomplish this, there are some apps out there that can help you organise your life and manage your time:

Forest

Do you find yourself studying, working on something and suddenly your phone buzzes? Social media is calling! It could be some breaking news, it could be a post from one of your friends. Forest offers you a reason not to pick up your phone: a little tree! Every time you want to focus on a task, you plant a tree, and the shoot pops up on your phone screen. You can set the amount of time that you want to work on a task and over the course of that time the tree will grow. If, during that time, you navigate away from the app, to check social media, to look at a news article, the tree dies. But if you stay focused, stay off your phone and get on with what you’re doing, you end up with a nice little tree. Over time you can build an entire forest of your own productivity. This is nice, if slightly silly, but in my experience it does push aside the urge to check in on your social media accounts when you know you should be working.

Trello

Trello is a programme for organising your tasks and keeping track of what needs to get done. The way it works is that it allows you to make cards for your tasks and move them through categories as you work on them. It can be particularly useful if you have a project to work on with various different jobs within it.

Remember the Milk

This is a really useful app for keeping track of day to day tasks and commitments. The basis of it is a simple list to which you can add tasks. You can set these tasks to repeat and add various tags to them. The big advantage of Remember the Milk is that it is designed to work across multiple devices meaning that you can get to your task list whether you are working on your PC, using a tablet at home or out and about with a phone. This flexibility means that it is really useful for keeping track of what you need to do wherever you are.

There are loads of apps out there that can help you organise your life and manage your time,. Different apps work for different people so why not give them a try? If you already use an app and we haven’t listed it here, please let us know by tweeting us @warwicklibrary

 

Image: clocks-time-wall-clock-alarm-clock-946934 / keenicon / CC0 1.0

 

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