Scott Glaysher

The Cord (Wilfrid Laurier University)

Smartphones and their many distractions don’t always have to be the enemy of a productive student.

Here’s a list of apps that will turn your smartphone into an organizational weapon. All of these apps are available for Android and iOS.

Any.do

This app is a must for all chronic to-do list makers. It makes organizing tasks easy, which is the first step to anyone’s productivity. These tasks and to-do points can be organized according to time, date, theme or priority. This app obviously runs off a touch interface so you can easily drag and drop tasks into various categories on top of marking them as completed. Nothing can replace the classic student planner, but if you prefer having to-do lists on your phone then this app is for you.

Buffer

Buffer will be a big hit for all you social media lovers. It allows you to send out tweets, Facebook messages, Instagram photos and a bunch of other online content. You can schedule the posts for months in advance right down to the minute, which can really boost your online presence. This app is made more for someone juggling a few different social media platforms. That being said, you can get detailed metrics on online activity such as clicks, retweets, likes, comments, shares, mentions and more.

Evernote

This is a cool app that you can use across multiple platforms. It helps students who get too distracted on their laptops and don’t function well with pen and paper for note taking. It also allows users to take and upload notes, pictures, audio and video snippets and carefully organize them into notebooks that can be synced across multiple devices. The formatting and sharing options are exceptional and would benefit anyone trying to succeed at their studious endeavours.

If This Then That

One of the biggest time wasters holding students back from ultimate productivity is internet nonsense. Have you ever been just scrolling through all your online notifications trying to deal with them all when you realize you’ve wasted three hours? IFTTT will fix this in a jiffy. The app automates tasks on your phone without you having to do a thing. You simply alter the settings so when something happens on the internet involving you at any level, the app will deal with it accordingly whether that is a ring, a text or push notification.

Vlingo

This app is used on all phone operating systems but seems to work best on the Blackberry, and is the only one on this list that is available on Blackberry World. It is essentially like having a mini “you” in your phone. As if your phone didn’t describe you enough already, now it can have fast and accurate voice recognition technology mixed with the capability to listen to what you say. Vlingo allows you to say anything you want done on your phone. You can fire off a text, tweet or email simply by speaking. This is a great feature for quickly connecting with people, businesses and activities so that you can get things done while on the go.