Category — College Productivity

We browsed the web looking to build a solid list of lists. Here’s what we found when it comes to the best free online tools and software for graduate students. Not all the tools are directly related to research or grad school. Many of them are. Nonetheless, we found that all of these lists are extremely useful.

• The Best Online Research Apps
• Free College Software Guide
• Top 10 Research Tools
• Free alternatives to proprietary software
• Top Web Tools for College Students
• 69 Free or Open Source Tools For Students
• Top Online & Research Tools
• Wikipedia’s List of Open Source Software
• 15 Open Source Tools For Art & Design Students
• 12 Tools For Researchers
• Lifehacker’s Guide to Free Software and Webapps
• 60+ Free Programming Tools
• Run Your Life With Your Cell Phones SMS

I found a great article over on Lifehack.org that talks about hacking your morning routine. While this article applies more to the busy professional it can apply just as equally well to the Graduate School Student as well.

One way to simplify your life and hack your mornings is to spend 15 minutes preparing at night to have a successful day ahead. Getting any homework out of the way, preparing for any meetings, study halls, and exams will bring you positive steps in the right direction for the following day.

This often overlooked 15 minutes at night will bring you loads of success and help you develop ridiculously good habits that will take you to the next level in your education.

Talking about getting things done sometimes it helps to have an offline Weekly Planner. OrganizeIT has created some amazing todo list templates, and other great pdfs for getting things done. Now they have updated their weekly planner so I have downloaded it in attempts to create a more organized life amongst the chaos that surrounds us.

There are some great features including

You will notice that there are three sections to the planner. The most prominant part at the top is the hard landscape and covers day (and time) specific next actions. Nothing goes here unless it has to be done on that particular day (and at a particular time, where applicable). If the next action isn’t date specific, it can simply go in the basic next actions box. However, if you have a lot of tasks under a particular context (@phone) or role/responsibility (parent) you have the option of grouping them so it’s all more organizied.

Head over and start getting organized today.

I hate dealing with financial junk. I personally have the worst of luck with banks and organizing my financial data. I came across an amazing financial planning website that rocks my financially unorganized world. It is called Mint.

Mint is fresh, intelligent online money management. Not only is Mint free, it saves you money. While existing personal finance software packages require hours to set up, a passion for accounting (is that possible?) and hours of weekly maintenance, Mint is virtually effortless.

With Mint, you can achieve better online financial management in less than five minutes. After that, revolutionary, patent–pending Mint money management software does the rest, with virtually no more work required. It automatically pulls together your bank, credit union and credit card data, and provides up–to–date and amazingly accurate views of your financial—life from the big picture to specific details, in a friendly and intuitive way.

Mint seems to be simple and secure and will make organizing all my finances that much easier and more cozy. Being able to jump in and really see what you are facing is sure helpful.

You might be thinking this part time business is not that important but is a great path to paying the bills and getting ahead on your student loans. Its also about buildng an online profile that you can apply in a future career path as well.

I personally recommend Reddit.com as my favorite social media hub. Social Media is a new way, well relatively new. I would say it has really grown up in the last 3 years with the growth of Social Media sites like Techmeme, Reddit,and Digg.

While you may or may not have huge success building a business and going to school it is a great learning experience and something you will be able to put on a resume. Social Media Skills are going to be something employers will be craving for in the years to come and grasping this niche will be huge in a declining economy where people are constantly looking to curb advertising and develop inhouse marketing tactics.

So If I were you i would keep this in mind as you build your online profile and business as well.

Continuing in our excursion into building a business while going to Grad School. Twitter is one of the networking and marketing tools that is essential. I use twitter daily to update folks on recent articles, thoughts, and other insights within my industry.

Twitter allows you to publis 140 character messages online or on your phone and interact likewise with people of common interests. Known as followers. Twitter is a great marketing tool, but its a better tool for conversations and networking.

Great tools to find people you may want to follow:
Twitter Search,twitters search engine is amazing and allows you find topics and people in which to follow.

Twubble, is a great tool to help you find cool people you may want to follow.

The thing I have noticed about Twitter is its all about consistency. You will find you have more interaction with followers if you tweet on a regular basis and dont just throw them Twitter Links to your blog posts.

Bonus Tip: TwitterFeed allows you to share your blog posts directly with your followers. Which saves you time in marketing.

Over the past 4 years you’ve been through a lot. You’ve lived away from your parents for the first time, you’ve been in charge of your own finances for the first time, you’ve taken responsibility for your academic performance and have asked the multi-layered question: What do I want to do with my life?

There are some people who just instinctively know what they want, but I think many of us need some time to reflect, consider our options and decompress from the ordeals (and fun ) of college life. As you’re in this transition mode, there are a few options standing in front of you:

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You might believe that going to school is enough to keep you crazy. But there are many people who not only go to school but hold down full time jobs as well. But what I find even more impressive is those few folks who manage to go to school and run successful businesses. I can think of a few people who have managed to pull this off. Ben Bleikamp is one of them. He managed a busy design business all the while attending Ohio State University.

The key thing in my belief is start a simple business. A simple business might be a drop shipping business, or a small web design firm.

In reality its about keeping things simple and managing your time well. Knowing what type of business to start is key. The business does not need to be in your field of interest. Although that would be awesome if you plan to use your GradSkills to build your own business.

In the next part of this article we will focus on how to build an online profile.

For someone who spends a ridiculous amount of time in front of a computer I find myself multitasking often. I have yet to find an ideal online note taking tool.

I find myself using Google Documents a lot as far as taking notes goes. However lately since I am working on a book I have found Wordpress.com to be a great tool. You can create a blog for each class, then using the WordPress.com Dashboard you can switch from class to class.

There are a number of tools to keep your WordPress.com blog up to date, but personally I love the web interface. Having a blog is also cool in that you can rapidly search through your notes on the fly, remember assignments, and if your professors offers videos embed them right into your notes.

Consider WordPress.com not only a great publishing platform but the webs best note taking platform as well.

Producitivy is something I struggle with at times. Calculating your church will determine if you are busy and unproductive or busy and productive.

By calculating your own churn rate, you can determine, precisely, how effective you are and how this effectiveness changes over time and different types of projects. The details of this calculation are as follows:

1. Make a list of active projects that are important to you to complete. These should not be projects that have deadlines. Instead, make them the optional work that would really help you get ahead if completed. Each should require around 1 – 2 weeks of fairly regular attention to complete. If it requires more, break it up into smaller chunks. If it requires less, don’t include it — it’s a task, not a project. Overall, you should have between 4 – 8 projects on this list.

2. Over the next 3 -6 weeks, try to work only on the active projects on your list. You’ll still have to complete deadline-driven work, of course, but don’t get seduced by a new idea and add it to your list until you’ve completed what is already there.

3. After around 3 weeks you can start calculating your churn rate as often as you like. The formula is as follows:

CR = [(number of completed projects from list)/(days elapsed since start of list)] * 100

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