10 productivity apps to help students stay organized

Key Takeaways

Notion is a powerful, all-in-one workspace that provides students with note-taking, task management, and database creation. Its customizable layouts, collaborative tools, and app integrations make it a powerful productivity tool for any student.
Todoist allows you to create projects, use tags, and set reminders, and it’s available on all platforms. In addition to monitoring progress, it syncs with apps such as Dropbox to optimize time management.
Trello’s boards, lists, and cards are an easy, visual way to manage projects and tasks. Its collaborative features and integrations with Google Calendar and Slack boost teamwork and productivity.
Google Drive gives students free access to collaborative platforms including Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Its cross-device accessibility makes for easy document sharing and management along with a seamless experience.
Evernote syncs across all your devices, saves images, and records voice notes. It helps students get organized by placing subjects into notebooks and allows for group study with its collaborative, real-time capabilities.
Forest turns staying focused into a game by limiting phone distractions while planting real trees. Its visual productivity meter and mobile-first design helps you stay focused for longer.

Whether you’re traversing the chaos of college life or the hustle of high school, it can be overwhelming. The right productivity apps can help students manage their time, organize tasks, and stay on top of assignments.

These tools even integrate into everyday classes and study habits, providing smart reminders, note-taking, and collaboration features. Considering the large variety of mobile productivity apps on the market, students will have no trouble finding a productivity app that caters to their unique studying habits and routines.

From enhancing concentration during study sessions to managing deadlines, these apps help fuel every student’s journey to success. Take a look at a few truly unique apps that help students improve their productivity.

They assist students in leading their academic course load and reach their educational objectives in a timely manner.

1. Notion

This is what makes Notion the most versatile tool for students. Key features include:

Note-taking
Task management
Database creation

Creating custom workspace layouts is easy and intuitive, so users can easily customize the way they work to suit their needs. Collaborative tools allow multiple users to edit projects simultaneously, so group assignments are a cinch.

Notion connects with other popular apps, streamlining productivity and keeping everything from tasks to to-dos in one place. This enormously flexible relational database allows you to have a database that tracks your whole life.

It’s an amazing free tool for keeping your work priorities and content calendars organized! Starting at $5/month or $48/year if paid upfront, Notion is cost-effective compared to Trello, providing more power at half the price.

The Pro Plan includes unlimited file uploads, while in the free plan there’s a 5MB limit per single file upload. It’s ideal for project management and novel creation, syncing easily between desktop and mobile devices.

With a 4.5+ star academic rating on both iOS and Android, it’s a smart choice for students.

Additionally, Todoist’s project creation, tags, and reminders make it pretty easy to keep your tasks organized and compartmentalized.

Here’s a quick table comparison:

Feature	Details
Project Creation	Organize tasks in projects or daily lists
Tags	Add context to tasks for easy search
Reminders	Set reminders to never miss a deadline

By giving users daily and weekly progress reports, users can manage their time more effectively. This includes new stats such as longest streaks and most productive times.

Compatible with iOS, Android, and web extensions, Todoist keeps you organized from wherever you are. Integrations with apps such as Dropbox and Amazon Alexa further extend its capabilities, making it a daily necessity for teams such as Doist.

Even Benjamin Franklin couldn’t have gotten everything done without pen and paper. Today, Todoist’s premium plan, $6 per month, offers unlimited history and offline tracking, perfect for today’s mobile productivity.

3. Trello

After that, Trello really stands out as a productivity tool, thanks to its easy-to-use boards, lists, and cards. These pieces are the basis for Trello’s kanban board, a visual design to organize and track work at a glance. Users can easily understand the status of a project at a glance.

Trello is the cure for digital fatigue, cutting down on unnecessary tab switching—one tab less at a time.

Boards: Overall project overview
Lists: Stages or categories within a project
Cards: Individual tasks or items

Trello helps you collaborate with ease. Plus, its Smart Links feature ensures everyone’s always on the same page and makes collaboration a breeze. With smart integration to Google Calendar and Slack, productivity soars as deadlines and team communications are seamlessly organized.

No matter the size of your team, Trello grows with you. With the help of Power-Ups, it can be a CRM or social media calendar.

4. Google Drive

With Google Drive, student collaboration is a cinch. With Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, collaboration is dog simple and lightning fast.

Here’s what each offers:

Google Docs: Real-time editing, comments, and suggestions.
Google Sheets: Collaborative data entry and analysis.
Google Slides: Joint presentation creation.

Students love the free access to these tools, and group assignments become much more feasible. Share documents easily and collaborate on edits with minimal effort.

With cross-device accessibility, you can be confident your work will sync between computers, tablets, and phones to keep your workflow running seamlessly. Google Drive offers 15 GB of free storage, making it ideal for big projects.

Automatically sync files from computers, USB drives and other sources. Offline access ensures that you’re never without your documents. Quickly convert any file to PDF format.

Google Drive offers a great free plan and paid options to increase storage. Odds are your school already uses Google’s services, which makes for even better integration.

5. Evernote

Coming in at number 5, Evernote’s rich array of features including device syncing, image saving and voice notes make it a clear winner. Here are some highlights:

Sync across all devices
Save images and attachments
Use voice notes for quick reminders

You can arrange your notes by using different notebooks, allowing you to easily divide topics and maintain your education organized. Collaboration tools are another big advantage, making study groups more effective with easy to use sharing and editing features for notes.

This empowers and enables more productive, creative, and less stressful group projects. Fully supported on iOS and Android, Evernote is a great cross-platform solution, but the iOS version does require a paid app.

Its search function is a game changer too, allowing you to find anything in your notes instantly. Ranked as one of the top apps for students, and with more than 20 million users, Evernote is a student’s dependable partner.

6. Forest

Forest brings a fun, games-like quality to productivity with its fresh take on focus and phone avoidance. Here’s how it works:

Users plant a virtual tree that flourishes as they remain productive.
Exiting the app to visit social media will kill the tree, promoting longer periods of concentration.
Earn rewards by earning minutes of focus! Then use this currency to plant real trees through Forest’s partnerships with tree-planting organizations.

Not only is Forest a fun app, it’s an app that helps you protect the environment. This innovative feature not only helps students build better study habits, but it gets them involved in real-world reforestation projects.

The app rewards you with a developing forest, creating a beautiful picture of your productivity and focus over months and years. Available on both iOS and Android, Forest is easy for any student to use, making it a great tool for students everywhere to increase productivity.

7. Microsoft OneNote

Microsoft OneNote shines as a multifaceted tool for students with features like note organization, drawing tools, and audio recording. Its smooth integration with other Microsoft Office apps makes it powerful. That’s why it’s easier than ever for students to incorporate Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations right into their notes.

This integration makes it easier than ever to manage classwork and assignments in one place. For collaboration, shared notebooks promote collaboration, allowing students to come together and work as a team on projects. Its cross-platform availability on iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows, and as a Chrome extension means students can have their notes on any device.

With a free plan, OneNote is a particularly accessible option. Personalization is the other big strength—especially created for Waterloo students with unique user ID links. This virtual notebook, which helps students manage their assignments and daily routines, provides flexibility that extends beyond educational purposes.

8. Focus@Will

Focus@Will is a revolutionary music service that’s scientifically optimized to get you into a powerful state of focus and stay there. With an impressive 90% success rate, this app provides a variety of sounds, including nature sounds, white noise, and calm music.

Its unique music selection process, based in neuroscience, ensures tracks are specifically designed to boost productivity. Users have access to playlists that are fully customizable to their tuning needs, providing the ideal backdrop to effective study sessions.

Focus@Will is available on iOS and Android. It’s incredibly versatile—it integrates easily with productivity apps including Trello and Asana, so you can use it wherever you are.

Available on all platforms including MacOS, Windows, and even a Chrome extension. The free plan means it’s easy on the budget for students.

It’s super easy to search by different genres to pair with whatever type of focus you’re looking to achieve. Focus@Will propels sustained concentration and focus.

Focus@Will is your most effective tool to avoid burnout and stay productive through marathon study sessions.

9. Slack

Next in line, Slack ensures keeping in contact is easy as pie through its bevy of communication tools. This tool even offers channels focused on particular subject areas. You’ll get powerful direct messaging for private one-on-one chats and quick file sharing, all with everything you need just a few clicks away.

Just picture it — all your projects organized beautifully in channels, sending fast messages to anyone, all without ever leaving Asana.

Integration is the other standout. Slack integrates with a host of other productivity tools, including Google Drive and Trello. That’s because your workflow gets more seamless, which in turn saves you time and lessens the chaos of juggling multiple platforms.

Slack is the best tool for collaboration. With all parties in alignment, it’s simple to monitor progress, assign responsibilities, and hold teams accountable for deliverables.

Cross-platform availability means you can work with the same seamless communication—whether on your laptop or phone—always staying in sync and up-to-date.

10. Quizlet

From flashcards to games and study modes, Quizlet truly dazzles with its wealth of powerful features. Here’s a quick look at what it offers:

Flashcards: Ideal for memorization and quick reviews.
Engaging options like Match and Gravity to reinforce learning.
Includes Learn, Write, and Test modes for varied approaches.

Interactive tools like Quizlet Live and Quizlet Match help transform study sessions into collaborative and competitive learning experiences that supercharge retention.

Students can explore a vibrant, community-driven ecosystem, making and sharing study materials with ease and encouraging collaboration and resource accessibility.

Featuring an app available on iOS and Android, it guarantees convenient, effective study sessions at home or while traveling.

With the Mix tab offering screen, slide, and audio recording options, and PowerPoint integration for quizzes like True False, it caters to diverse educational needs.

Audio and video settings are customizable at any time, allowing for personalized study sessions.

Conclusion

After all, diving into productivity apps like these can dramatically shift how you tackle your workload. Notion and Todoist keep my daily to-dos organized and flowing. Or for as simple as Google Drive for storing and sharing files, or the new Trello app as a way to visually manage your projects. Evernote helps you take notes in the moment, and Forest keeps you focused with a creative concept. Microsoft OneNote shines with its note-taking features, Focus@Will tunes up concentration, Slack connects you with your team, and Quizlet makes studying a breeze. Whether students are looking to manage their time better, stay more organized, or work more efficiently, each app has something special to offer. Take a look at these to see which works best for your needs. Dive in, choose one, and watch your productivity soar!

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the benefits of using Notion for students?

Notion is a great tool to help students keep their notes, tasks, and group projects organized and in one place. With its rich customization and integration options, Notion is the perfect platform to keep track of your course work and personal projects in an organized way.

How can Todoist improve a student’s productivity?

Todoist is a great way for students to keep task lists organized and update deadlines. By allowing for reminders and priority level designation, it keeps students on track with completing assignments and encourages time management skills.

Is Trello useful for group projects?

Sure, Trello is great for teamwork. Its board and card system allows teams to plan, assign, and monitor the status of all activities on a project visually and in real-time.

Why should students use Google Drive?

Google Drive offers collaborative cloud-based document, presentation, and spreadsheet creation and editing, with real-time collaboration capabilities. Plus, it makes file sharing and collaboration a cinch, which makes it ideal for group assignments and keeping track of important coursework.

How does Evernote assist with note-taking?

Evernote is a great tool for students to keep all of their notes in one place. Its search functionality and ability to sync across devices make it a reliable tool for keeping all study materials accessible.

What is the primary purpose of using Forest?

Forest helps you stay productive by planting virtual trees with the help of a timer. When students don’t get distracted, their forest continues to grow, encouraging students to stay focused while they work in order to grow their forests.

How can Quizlet enhance study sessions?

Quizlet provides virtual flashcards and study games. Through interactive learning, it allows students to expedite the memorization and review of material, making study sessions more productive and fun.