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Super-productivity License: MIT

A definite guide to attain maximum productivity. Suitable for developers/students. (Work in Progress).

I recommend watching this repository, We will be adding more tools every week!

This repo is a collection of applications and tools for any users/developers that would help them to attain maximum productivity in their daily life. Feel free to contribute / star / fork / pull request . Any recommendations and suggestions are welcomed.

Acknowledgement:

Everything written below is from my own experience in college and after reading various materials. I am neither a professional nor expert, but a student who has great passion. Anyone can open a discussion in the issue section, or a pull request in case something should be modified or added.

STOP: If you are guilty of procrastination and want to improve your life, this guide is for you. So, quickly READ THE LINE BELOW before MOVING AHEAD:

READ EVERYTHING IN THIS GUIDE WHILE GIVING EXTREME IMPORTANCE, CONCENTRATION AND WITH THE THOUGHT YOU ARE FINALLY GOING TO DO THIS.

Unlike any other Awesome lists available out here it would not be a good thing to just highlight or make a bullet list of a series of services available and let you figure it out yourself on how to make your life super-productive. From my past experience, I now decided that this requires a careful fine print of plan with exact tools or measures to do at a given point of time.

So, here's what I'll do:

  1. Mention exactly one final tool to use and not give a list of alternatives (in case you still want any alternatives I'll recommend searching it online on your own as that' easy or use recommend.md list to add your alternatives for others to see and use.)

  2. Give brief and to the point guide on how to be productive considering everyday life of a student while recommending the tools (this led me to use and find great free one's first so this approach was good enough for me). Don't worry, you can apply this same guide in your life too irrespective of whether you are student or not.

YouTube

Content Creators to Follow:

  • Thomas Frank - Thomas gives really insightful videos on how to manage your time during your semester and other useful tips though more details can be found on his Podcast as well. He also has great organizational skills and recommends tools frequently that would help one a lot. Definitely recommended.

  • Casey Neistat - Casey is a really productivity loving guy on YouTube when you really get to know how he lives and manages daily life though I usually watch him to get inspired or motivated. Crazy stuff.

  • Coding Tech - Really informational coding channel that explains everything in detail.

Your smartphone (iOS or Android) :

Unless you are living in a cave you probably have a smartphone filled with a ton of Apps or only few that you don't use much but one thing is common which is that it's probably not managed/organized properly and if you want to be productive! Guess what, we will have to organize it first.

Since I have an iOS device I will explain it using its features but I think Android might also be having same features and you can easily find alternative apps if I recommend something that's not available on Play Store.

Let's start with Phone Settings:

For me, except mail, money manager app and except few other important ones all other notifications sounds, badge icons are disabled. This helps me to concentrate on important tasks so do it!

Display accommodations are set to 'Reduce Motion' as it lets me quickly move in between apps.

Now APPS:

On a lovely Friday night, I decided to spend whole day finding apps that would let me do exactly what I want for free and If I really like the service I would eventually pay for the premium package.

I have organized my home screen with only 2 screens which means 1st one is the most important apps screen filled with Apps I daily use and the second screen is with Extras and apps that are required once in a month but I don't want to delete these just to have to install it later (side note, if you have 16 GB of storage it's recommended to not install the second screen ones).

Screenshots:

iPhone Screenshot

My iPhone is organized into a number of folders i.e. Work, Photo, Time, Sift and company apps(Apple, Google).

The Work folder is the most important one. Currently, I am doing a marketing job so there's Dropbox in there to share files but you need to find your ONLY important work related apps and put it inside this folder.

The one which are time killers and make me un-productive are in the 'Time' folder whereas the Apple and Google folder has all of their remaining apps.

The 'Sift' folder has the unwanted or used once in a month apps.

Now let's highlight the important apps:

  • Pocketbook (Free) - Since I currently live in Australia, Pocketbook is the app I use to automatically manage the bank account transactions so it highlights where I spend the most weekly or on monthly basis. If you can't use it in your country I recommended finding similar ones that have some kind of automation in it.

  • Habitica (Free) - You don't know how much difficult making new habits is. With habitica one can easily set up new habits to be made and after 30 days you will get used it. Highly recommended after I removed it a lot of times because I didn't want to use it but it works perfectly and I finally got used to it.

  • Google Calender (Free) - This is the only calendar app you need. Add all of your repetitive daily tasks and it will remind even when you forgot about it. I did add a widget for it so now I easily just swift right and see my next event.

  • News (Apple News App & Medium) - Since I don't have much time to read news I use Apple news to quickly glance what's happening and then have a look at Medium to read some good insightful stories like this (j/k).

  • Automation (For automation to tasks I use IFTTT & Airtable) - I did setup a number of tasks on IFTTT but a lot of them are using Airtable to create a database of what I do on Social Media. For e.g. Any new photo liked or follower I have on Instagram, Twitter IFTTT automatically adds to my Airtable database. (Don't know how much useful this particular task is but I still have to figure this out correctly).

  • Safari (Web Browser) - For general purpose browsing also I don't trust the other apps (like Google, Firefox). Safari just works perfectly on iPhone.

  • Music (Spotify & SoundCloud) - I have a number of study playlists in Spotify that helps me concentrate on important tasks and Few more over at Soundcloud. I rarely listen to top charts so there's that as well.

  • Task Management (Trello & Todoist) - It's highly important if you want to be productive in life that you use good task-management apps. Though one can set tasks in Habitica as well but I use a particular app only for what it was made initially. So, Trello is what use for my projects and I divide into a number of tasks. Todoist is when I want to quickly jot down important dates when In lecture or a meeting.

All the other apps are not that important for being productive so let's move on.

Websites:

  • Reddit - Yes, reddit can be a productivity warehouse if you use it correctly. Create a new account and subscribe to all the important subreddits over here.

  • Product Hunt - If you have been actively trying to find a new product then you probably know about Product Hunt. It is a great resource where developers/users find new products and you can follow different topics as well. I did make a Chrome extension to get all the PH stats on Twitter easily So here's the (Shameless plug).

  • Inbox Zero - Inbox Zero is a rigorous approach to keep your inbox empty at all times. For more details and how to get started watch Thomas Frank's video on it.

  • Bullet Journal - At times, I found that its sometimes impossible to type your notes on your Laptop, tablet etc. so I now use this approach to quickly highlight what I need to do and make notes as well. Highly Recommended.

  • SmallPDF - One stop destination for all your file conversion needs.

  • Noisli - Improve Focus and Boost productivity with background noise. Really helps when I want to complete a task/assignment quickly.

File Management:

  • Google Drive - Simple, elegant and versatile (PC, Macs, Android...) cloud storage solution. Use this for general purpose.
  • Dropbox - Cloud storage solution deeply integrated in the Google ecosystem. I use this for my work-related task.

Tools:

  • Toby - Toby is what I use instead of native Google Chrome bookmarks storage to organize tools/websites I need quickly. Use this tool, you'll love it. Attaching a quick screenshot below so you have an Idea of how I use it.

  • LastPass - Simple solution for all your accounts which it stores with strong passwords. Highly Recommended.

  • Cold Turkey - No other blocking tool works as great as Cold Turkey. Unlike Stay Focusd it doesn't even let you uninstall the app if blocking is active. Crazy stuff.

Notes

For being a productive guy, I wanted a medium that is free and provides a seamless backup for all my devices. Here's the tool that won.

  • Onenote - I know! Mircrosoft's Onenote isn't used as much as other note taking apps but there was literally no one else that made love again writing notes on laptop, tablet or phone. The design is so much better and with the notebook features the whole experience is amazing.

Toby Screenshot

Dumb Tools (Some may want to use it):

In this section I would like to highlight the tools I never found useful but found it recommended online maybe one guy is just recommending it with dumbfoundingly just because he saw others use it. Just for the sake of it, I did gave it a justifiable shot and now if you want or trust me can ignore them or stop using it.

  1. LifeHacker - This site offers nothing like what one get a hint from reading its name. Most of the content is similar to clickbait style or Mashable like not newsworthy content.