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organizing your digital clutter[Apps for the Busy Student]
Contact Info
Timothy SwiffenAccess Technologist
Office for Students with Disabilities
Remember, there is no magic bullet
Finding a solution that works for you
will require experimentation.
Keeping Your Notes Organized
Time Management
Distraction Management
Reference Managers
Organizing Your Notes
Notes are only as useful as your ability to review them after the fact.
It is also important to consider what kind of notes you find most useful.
Are you a visual learner? Do you prefer to listen to information? Or do you work better with text?
Organizing Your Notes
There are hundreds of different note-taking apps out there, with a wide variety of features. The following three apps have different approaches, but all of the are multi-platform, free, and have an online backup so you’ll never lose your files.
Evernote
SpringPad
SimpleNote
Evernote is the most popular note taking app. It has hundreds of features, can take audio notes, photo notes and sync with pretty much any device.
Evernote
SpringPad
SimpleNote
• Evernote lets you tag and quickly search your notes.
• If you use a LiveScribe pen, your class notes can be automatically uploaded to Evernote.
• Evernote can preform basic OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on pictures you take on your phone.
Organizing Your Notes
• Evernote also has a great web browser extension called Clearly that strips a web page down to it’s essential text and images, let’s you preform Text-to-Speech, and save sites to your Evernote account.
SpringPad’s strength lies in organizing a wide range of different items, from to-do lists to class notes to paper drafts.
Evernote
SpringPad
SimpleNote
• Create a notebook for each class, one for your personal life, another for any clubs you are involved in.
• SpringPad also has a number of collaboration features so that you can share notes with friends, collaborate on projects or give each other feedback on your draft essays.
Organizing Your Notes
• SpringPad can also let you re-arrange and visualize your notes.
SimpleNote is a plain text note taking program that by design has a few features other than a very powerful search engine.
Evernote
SpringPad
SimpleNote
• SimpleNote keeps all of your notes backed up on a cloud server, so you’ll never lose your notes.
• SimpleNote is indexed so that as long as you remember at least one word that is contained within the entire note you will be able to find it again.
Organizing Your Notes
• SimpleNote is a great app if you find yourself overwhelmed or distracted by feature-filled web apps.
While SimpleNote can be accessed on your web browser, there are numerous apps that can sync with your various devices.
Evernote
SpringPad
SimpleNote
Windows: ResophNotes
OSX: Notational Velocity
iOS: SimpleNote
Android: Notational Acceleration
Windows Phone: Metro Note
Blackberry: BerryNote
Organizing Your Notes
Evernote
SpringPad
SimpleNote
Evernote• Very powerful with a number of features.• Great for students who use audio and/or visual
notes.• Can be a bit overwhelming and distracting.
SimpleNote• Easy to search through thousands of notes.• Simple to use with a non-distracting interface.• Text only, does not support visual learners.
SpringPad• Allows you to create different notebooks to keep
notes separate.• Allows you rearrange and visualize your notes.• Social networking aspects of this app can be a
possible distraction.
Organizing Your Notes
Overview
Keeping Your Notes Organized
Time Management
Distraction Management
Reference Managers
Time Management
Time management and scheduling is an important part of success in University.
WorkFlowy
Google Calendar
Wunderlist
Not only will good time management strategies help you keep on top of what you need to do, but it will help you plan to avoid binge-studying in the future.
Like note-taking apps, time management apps come in a variety of shapes and sizes and it’s important to experiment to see what works for you.
Google Calendar (and other calendar apps)
Wunderlist
Workflowy
Google Calendar, Microsoft Exchange, iCal, are all very good apps that can help you keep track of your daily schedules and send you reminders when important tasks are due.
Google Calendar can also e-mail you a daily agenda as a reminder of what you need to do each day.
Any of these can be synced with any of your devices.
Time Management
Google Calendar can let you view your tasks either as a separate list or as an item on your calendar.
It is best to set aside a time each Sunday evening or early Monday morning to plan your week out. The apps are only as good as your input.
Google Calendar (and other calendar apps)
Wunderlist
Workflowy
Wunderlist, unlike a calender, is focused entirely on to-do lists.
It is also free and available on nearly every mobile platform.
It is designed to help you quickly organize tasks you need to do.
Time Management
As long as you assign due dates to tasks it can easily give you daily and weekly to-do lists.
Google Calendar (and other calendar apps)
Wunderlist
Workflowy
WorkFlowy takes a very different approach to organizing your projects, allowing you to create branching lists and sublists.
WorkFlowy is also available on a number of mobile platforms and is an easy to use web app.
The app is entirely in text and depends on you to tag each bullet point with hashtags.
Time Management
It allows you to easily assign tasks and share lists with group mates.
Keeping Your Notes Organized
Time Management
Distraction Management
Reference Managers
ZoteroZotero works as either a Firefox extension or as a standalone app. It can import and organize pretty much any kind of academic paper. Zotero also let’s you sync your references online so that you can access them from any computer.
EndNoteEndNote is free for university students and has a number of great features for integrating with Word, like the automatic bibliography and in-text citation builders.
MendeleyMendeley is a free web and desktop app that helps you organize large databases of academic papers. It also has iPhone and iPad apps that let you read and markup pdfs, while keeping your notes organized and searchable.
Reference Managers
Keeping Your Notes Organized
Time Management
Distraction Management
Reference Managers
Often, when we’re writing we have too much on the go, you have pdfs open, your web browser, your email, your music player.
More and more programs have distraction-free modes that force you to focus in on your current task only.
Don’t worry about formatting until you are done with the important work of getting your paper written!
Programs that aim for distraction-free writing also have the ability to track your writing progress so that you can give yourself daily goals.
Eliminate Distractions
Microsoft Word, Pages, and LibreOffice are all great programs for creating professional looking documents, but they have a number of disadvantages for the process of writing:
• Word Processors were designed to replace secretarial functions, not to help the writing process.
• Word encourages a linear writing format, yet many people write in a non-linear manner.
• Word struggles to keep track of numerous documents (notes, brainstorms) and long documents (theses, dissertations).
• Word has 100s of distracting features that are largely irrelevant to University writing (when was the last time you needed to do a mail merge?).
Eliminate Distractions
These programs can also work with the built in text to speech features of OSX and Windows 7 and the text files they export can be brought into any other writing program such as Wynn or Kurzweil.
OSX and iOS: WriteRoom
Windows: WriteMonkey
Linux: Focus Writer
Eliminate Distractions
Academic writing is often a very convoluted process, where your ideas sometimes only become clear after you’ve written them down.
Scrivener is a program that was developed by a novelist to be a set of tools to facilitate the creative process.
Features:• Move quickly between your brainstormed ideas, an
outline, and your written text.• Keep all of your related files in research in the same
easy to access space.
• Set yourself a wide variety of writing targets, from daily writing goals to word to word limits for sections.
• Write in distraction free mode with a font that you are comfortable with and export it into a format that meets your course requirements.
Eliminate Distractions
Thank you for your time!
Contact Info
Timothy SwiffenAccess Technologist
Office for Students with Disabilities
