There are an increasing number of AI tools available to help with productivity and creativity. Those recommended at university level tend to fall into the following main categories. The services listed under each heading have the highest popularity ratings among students and researchers:
Project and task management apps
Apps in this area help individuals and teams work more efficiently by managing tasks, automating workflows, and improving communication. They tend to include to-do lists, project and task management and time management.
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Trello
Visual task management tool. Create Kanban-style ‘work boards’ with sticky notes to organise your projects, then fill them with tasks, assign deadlines, updates. These can be shared with others, are highly customisable and are designed for ease of use.
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Todoist
To-do list app which is useful for organising and managing your tasks. This allows users to keep track of lists and deadlines and offers reminders and progress-tracking. It’s a straightforward app for basic task management and collaboration.
Apps to encourage focus and block distractions
Designed to help you focus, these kinds of apps work in various ways. Some provide timers you can set for deep focused work. Others help by reducing or eliminating distractions while you work. Others work by gamifying tasks, allowing you to earn rewards for uninterrupted work. Choose something that works best for you. The most popular we found are:
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Forest
This pomodoro-style app gamifies focus by rewarding uninterrupted work with a virtual tree. When users stay focused for longer, this will grow into a forest. If they are distracted by their phone, the trees will die. As a bonus, the app allows you to contribute your ‘rewards’ towards financing real tree planting.
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Freedom
This app lets you create your own list of ‘distracting’ websites and apps, which it will block. You can then either schedule regular focused sessions or start them whenever you like. Freedom can block interruptions across all your devices ensuring consistent distraction management.
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StayFocusd
Another desktop app to block time-wasting and encourage productivity. Create your own list of ‘distracting’ and ‘timewasting’ websites, set your timer, and get more done. StayFocusd also has a ‘nuclear’ option to block, with no option to unblock within your focused time.
Apps for note taking
Organise your notes into virtual notebooks that combine different formats – written text, webpages, AV materials, images.
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Notion
This is a note-taking and task management tool. It is designed to organise and keep track of class notes, assignments and schedules in a flexible and customisable way. Users can upload notes and plan assignments and revision.
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Evernote
This app allows you to save various kinds of content including slides, hand-written notes, PDFs, webpages and images across different devices into digital notebooks.
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MS OneNote
This Microsoft application can organise notes into digital notebooks. It allows users to combine typed content, hand-written notes and audio or video notes. It can also contain drawings and images clipped from webpages.
Revision tool apps
These apps allow users to design their own revision tools via social learning. Features include creation of quizzes, flashcards and mind maps, and often allow use of other users’ materials.
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Quizlet
This is a learning tool that allows you to create your own flashcards and quizzes – or to use existing sets generated and shared by other users. Quizlet also offers interactive games to engage users in different ways.
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Anki
This is a free open-source flashcard service. Users can create their own or use existing sets. Anki times your responses and then prioritises cards for more challenging learning.
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GoConqr
This is a social learning platform where users can create and access existing digital learning resources such as mind-maps, flashcards, quizzes and notes.
Voice-to-text and text-to-voice
These apps will transcribe audio recordings – or to convert written text to audio for listening on the go.
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Otter.ai
Live transcription and notetaking software. The free, ‘Basic’ version ‘records, transcribes and summarizes in real time’. It can join Zoom and Teams meetings to write and share notes.
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Listening.com
This is an audio-to-text service aimed specifically at academic users. It is able to convert multiple formats of text files into audio so that users can listen at their own pace. These can be divided up into sections. It also includes a note-taking function, allowing for users to add their own notes to papers for export.
