Hi! I’m Polina, a second-year university student studying while also working part-time as a Marketing Assistant here at Working Options. As exam season is right around the corner, I wanted to share some great free apps that I use to help you study SMARTER!
First up is Google Calendar. Before starting your revision, it is important to have a clear plan of what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it, which is where this great app comes into play.
Google Calendar will allow you to organise your life by inputting all your classes, extracurriculars, events and assignments and see when you have time to sit down and revise. I use this app to time block study sessions leading up to exams to stay prepared and on track.
Next up is Notion, a productivity and note-taking web app. Notion is an incredibly versatile with many possibilities – make an assignment tracker, class notebooks, goal trackers, track your to-dos and budget, as well as having a new built-in AI that can help with checking spelling and grammar or generating ideas for text.
Check out these guides to learn how to use Notion to organise your studies:
If you like using to-do lists to stay organised but need a better way of keeping track of them, try Todoist. This is another app that allows you to organise and categorise your projects and to-dos, setting deadlines and reminders for them. You can also integrate your tasks from this app with Google Calendar. Using this app, you can keep all your plans and tasks in your pocket on your phone, instead of in a random notebook lost somewhere in your room.
Once you’ve organised your work, what apps will help you actually get it done?
If you have a lot of reading to do and are struggling to stay focused, try Speechify.
This is an app that converts text to speech, reading out any text from articles, textbooks or PDFs. The app also allows you to customise the voice and reading speed and can highlight the words while reading them, helping you stay focused. Speechify has saved me in many late night study sessions, stopping me from drifting off into sleep.
Now that you’ve read the information, what is the best way to memorise it?
One of the best revision techniques is active recall, a study method that requires you to make an effort to remember information that you have already learned, further solidifying it in your memory.
One perfect platform to use for this is Quizlet, an app allowing you to create, study and share digital flashcards in different ways. Not only can you make and practice flashcards, but Quizlet allows you to memorise and test your knowledge in different ways, like multiple choice questions and games.
Another option, the key to my A*s at A-level, is Anki, another flashcard app that is free to download on a computer, very useful for memorising large amounts of information. The main benefit of Anki over Quizlet is that it uses a spaced repetition mechanism to optimise your long-term memory of the information you learn. The app does this by automatically calculating when you should next review each flashcard according to your confidence in your answer.
Both apps also allow you to download and use flashcards that have been made by others, saving study time.
Now that you have planned your studying and know how best to revise, are you struggling to stay focused?
If you are, you are not alone, and you’re in luck as I have two great apps for you. First is Flora. This app plants a virtual seed when you set a timer to work. If you stay focused and do not use your phone, the seed grows into a tree, and if you leave the app the tree dies. By focusing and growing more and more trees, you create a virtual forest. The app also allows you to plant trees with friends, helping you focus and study in groups.
Finally, a great feature of this app is that you can help the environment by using it, as using the virtual trees you have planted you can donate to help environmental organisations plant real trees!
Not a fan of planting trees? Try Focus Keeper instead. This is an app that helps you focus by implementing the Pomodoro technique, breaking down work into intervals of 25 minutes with a 5-minute break after each. The app includes a built-in to-do list, allowing you to track the total time you have spent studying, as well as the time spent on each task. Breaking up your studies into short bursts of 25 minutes often makes the work you need to do feel less daunting and keeps you energised and focused thanks to the frequent breaks.
And that’s it, now you have all the apps you need to get organised, focus and study! If you only have space in your mind and phone for two, my top recommendations are Quizlet and Notion. The Quizlet app is easier to navigate than Anki, while still being a powerful flashcard tool, making it a good place to start. Notion is my other top pick because of how versatile it is, I highly recommend!
Thank you for reading! I hope these apps will help you simplify your studies as much as they helped me! Let me know how you get on and if you enjoy using them, and make sure to tell us if you want more recommendations or have any of your own.
Watch the video version here: Top 8 Study Apps Video
