With midterms in full swing and finals looming over the horizon, it’s important to focus now more than ever. Unfortunately for students everywhere, the Internet – with its Facebooks and Youtubes, Reddits and Tumblrs – doesn’t want to let that happen. Getting distracted can be easy, but there are tools out there that make it easier to stay on track.
1. Block Site – Website Blocker
Block Site is a Google Chrome extension that automatically blocks websites of your choice and can redirect you to another site instead. Alex Nunez-Thompson, a senior at Sid Richardson College, uses Block Site regularly on his laptop. “Block Site prevents me from migrating to Facebook when working on my laptop. You can choose what days of the week and what times during the day you want that site blocked. For example, I have Facebook blocked from 8 – 5 every weekday. Additionally, you can set a redirect page (e.g. Owl-Space) to remind you to get back to work.”
2. Asana – Team Productivity Tool
Asana helps keep projects and tasks in one spot, and is useful for assigning team members different tasks related to the same project. In my experience Asana is just a glorified list of tasks, but people that I’ve worked with in the past swear by it. Ani Kunaparaju, a freshman Computer Science major, said that “Asana enables people to know what tasks they’re working on, communicate on the tasks within the platform, and create subtasks, upload files and everything [else].”
3. Slack – Group Messaging App
Slack is a group messaging website and mobile app. Rather than message your friends on Facebook, where it’s easy to get distracted, try using Slack. Slack is designed for group communication, so whether you’re using it for a project or your study group is using Slack to help each other out, it has tools such as message boards to help you get the job done. When asked about how he used Slack, freshman Tian Udomsak had this so say, “Slack’ s multi channel support allows me to communicate with the relevant people for a specific task, and keep the whole team up-to-date when necessary.”
4. Web Timer – Procrastination Tracker
Web Timer isn’t exactly a productivity tool, but it can be helpful in gauging how much you procrastinate. Web Timer measures the amount of time you spend on different websites, both overall since you’ve installed it and over the last day. As you can see, I haven’t been that productive today:
Hopefully these tools help you stay focused while you’re trying to study for your upcoming exams. Now stop reading articles and go study!