Smartphones have become indispensable. When they first burst into our lives, they were lauded for being tools that would make our day to day communication exponentially efficient. Unfortunately, most of us use it less to manage our lives and more to get our schedules even more entangled. 

Perhaps, it is time to use smartphones for what they really are—personal assistants and productivity aids. A huge variety of apps that aid in performing multiple tasks are available in the Play Store (for Android) and the App Store (for iOS). These apps have been designed after a lot of market research and customer-need assessments. 

While productivity apps can be useful for anyone from any age group, we hold a notion that it is only for office-goers. Today, even adolescents and young adults need equal productivity in their everyday routine. Luckily for us, there are apps that allow us to stay organised throughout school by helping us take better notes, create schedules, plan budgets, complete projects and create backups. 

Here are five apps that help high-schoolers and college students manage their every day schedules. 

Office Lens 

With over five million downloads, Office Lens, developed by Microsoft, is a really amazing app that lets you take pictures of documents, whiteboards, blackboards, magazines, receipts, and more and convert them into editable, shareable text. Moreover, Office Lens can trim and enhance the pictures and convert images to PDF, Word and PowerPoint files. The files can then be saved to OneNote, OneDrive, or your device.  

The next time you get a handout or get hold of your friend’s notes, you can scan them quickly and then convert them into text files that are easy to edit and annotate. Bye-bye writing and rewriting. This app increases your productivity and reduces possible time and energy loss. You can save notes and share them on the go. 

This handy-app is available for free in iOS, Android and Windows platforms.

Evernote

Developed by the Evernote Corporation, Evernote is an app designed for organising. It gives you all the tools you need to keep your work effortlessly organised. It helps you to take notes in a variety of formats: text, sketches, photos, audio, video, PDFs, web clippings and more. It works as a digital notepad that can also take pictures, scan and add comments on pieces of paper, business cards, sketches or any written/ printed documents.

As Evernote can easily be synced to all available devices, it is efficient and effective. You can also easily share your ideas and discuss in a collaborative way with others. Furthermore, you can also set reminders and create to-do lists and organise your personal checklists.

Students could make great use of this app not just to plan their every day and to store ideas, but also for project management and efficient studying during exams. 

Sleep Cycle 

Some nights you are busy indulging in your devices right through the morning, other times you are pulling an all-nighter for a submission—either way when you are student, it is given that your sleep is at all times compromised. As important as it is to attend lectures and do assignments, it is also equally important to get a good night’s sleep. A good night’s sleep does not only mean waking up rested. 

The Sleep Cycle app basically is an intelligent alarm clock that analyses our sleeping pattern and wakes us up in our lightest sleep phase hence, waking us up feeling rested and relaxed. While we sleep, we go through a lot of phases and also move differently during those phases. Sleep Cycle monitors our movement during sleep by using the extremely sensitive accelerometer on our phones and then finds the optimal time (during the lightest sleep phase) to wake us up during a 30 minute window that ends at our set alarm time.  

Also, it takes notes of how daily events and activities such as drinking coffee, eating too much or having a stressful day affect our sleeping pattern and sleep quality.

As this app was developed using proven sleep science and years of research and development, it has been featured in The CNN, The Wired, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, BBC, The New York Times and many more.

Mathway

Having trouble doing your Mathematics assignment? Here’s your super-app to the rescue! With over a million downloads, millions of users world-wide and billions of problems solved, Mathway is really the world’s numero uno math problem solver. From basic algebra to complex calculus, Mathway can instantly solve even the most difficult math problems. All we need to do is—simply type the problem or upload a picture of the question. Mathway is capable of providing not only the answers but also a detailed step-by-step solution to the problem. It covers: Basic Math Pre-Algebra, Algebra, Trigonometry, Precalculus, Calculus, Statistics, Finite Math, Linear Algebra and Graphing. It is like a private Math tutor in the palm of your hands, ready to provide instant homework help anywhere, anytime.

Goodbudget

Developed by Dayspring Technologies, Goodbudget (formerly EEBA, the Easy Envelope Budget Aid) is a money manager and expense tracker that works exceptionally well for budget planning. It is a personal finance manager and a proactive budget planner that helps us keep track of our bills and finances. As it allows easy synching over a variety of devices, it helps in real-time tracking and sharing of our budget with our budgeting partners.

Not only does it keep track of our finances, it also has special features like: Goal and Annual Envelopes that encourage users to save for the future. Moreover, as the records are backed up to the Goodbudget’s website, there is less chance or records getting mismatched. Due to its excellent performance, it has been widely recommended by experts from Google, The New York Times, Forbes, LifetimeTV, Lifehacker and many more.

Students can use this app to manage their monthly expenditure and get an overview of much they are spending on lunch, on hangouts, on commute and on books and shopping.