3 Free Studying Tools That Will Increase Your Productivity

Studying effectively is essential for academic success, and luckily, the internet offers numerous free tools to aid in this endeavor. Unlike many paid apps, these free options provide accessible and powerful features. In this blog post, we'll explore three free studying tools that can significantly increase your productivity and help you achieve better learning outcomes.

Note-Taking and Knowledge Organization App

Taking good notes is a fundamental part of studying, and using a smart note-taking app can revolutionize this. There is nothing wrong with taking notes on paper. In fact, many people prefer this over digital note-taking. From my personal experience, I like using a mix. I take notes on paper because it helps me slow down my thoughts and take more time to understand the topic. Later, I transfer them to a note-taking app where I can organize them better. This is where my favorite knowledge organization app, Notion, comes in. We can capture what we have learned, organize those notes, and sync them across devices. Plus, it's free.

A great feature is that we can create pages within pages. It is almost like the folder structure on a computer. We create a page: Computer Science Course, and then in that page, create subpages for different topics: Introduction to Programming, Data Science, ... Additionally, we can quickly search through our notes, making it effortless to find specific information. Needless to say, this would not be possible to do on paper.

Keeping Track of Topics

As we dive into various subjects and topics, it's crucial to keep track of what we've covered and what's remaining. My personal approach for this is to use a Kanban board. A Kanban board visualizes tasks and tracks their progress. The board typically consists of columns representing different stages of the workflow, and cards representing individual tasks. Even though this is commonly used for project management, we can equally use it to keep track of our study areas. We could create a task for each subject and then move it to the appropriate column depending on the progress. This way, we can stay organized and ensure that no topic or assignment slips through the cracks. While there are many tools out there to do this, one that I personally like and that is free is Monday.com.

Create Flashcards to Memorize What You've Learned

Memorization is often a crucial aspect of studying, and creating flashcards can be an effective technique to reinforce our learning. Fortunately, there are numerous free flashcard maker tools available. One such tool is Flashmorize.com. This free flashcard maker provides a simple and intuitive interface for creating flashcards on the web.

We can organize our digital flashcards into study topics. We can then be quizzed based on these flashcard sets, choosing the order we want to review the flashcards in. For instance, we can start with the flashcards we have memorized the worst so far. This is possible because Flashmorize.com assigns a score to each flashcard, capturing how well we memorized it.