As technology becomes more and more prevalent in our lives, it’s important to learn how to use it and integrate in into our workflows.

Tech, when used, should ideally fade into the background. It shouldn’t get into the way of a workflow; rather, it should enhance it. It should make workflows more efficient and/or more reliable.

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It’s important that tech isn’t used everywhere. Often, us tech-heads tend to get into a headspace in which we try to find a technological solution to all our problems, and try to find apps and/or products that aid every single part of our workflows. It’s, therefore, important to keep in mind that there can be non-tech-based aids to workflows, and they often get in the way less than tech-based alternatives.

Keeping these North Stars in mind, I’ve come up with a study structure that involves a good mix of tech and non-tech solutions to problems. My system prioritizes cross-platform compatibility, reliability, and ease of use.

So, here are the apps I use, almost on a daily basis, to help me study!

1. Notion

Of course, the darling of every productivity YouTuber, Notion! The heart of everything I do - creative projects, notes, and study material - is Notion. It’s the key to my efficiency!

There are a few things I really love about Notion.

Firstly, Notion’s cross-platform support is really strong (and reliable - something that’s often overlooked when looking at cross-platform support in an app) with apps for Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android.

Secondly, Notion is super powerful. Notion has support for some pretty insane automations and things (which I don’t even know how to use, to be honest). The main reason I like Notion’s power is the fact that I can structure my documents like a tree: pages inside of pages inside of pages. This makes it really intuitive (if a bit slow) to access the documents I need to. For example, my notes on the cognitive approach from my 11th grade psychology portion is very easy to access: go to AS-Level notes, click on Psychology, and click on Cognitive Approach. I really enjoy the kind of structure I’m able to create with Notion.

Also, something pretty underrated is Notion’s widget for Android. The widget holds all my “Favourite” pages, which allows me to access them with just one click.

But that doesn’t mean Notion is perfect, of course.

For one, Notion is pretty slow. It takes quite a while to boot up and open pages with a lot of information in them. This means that it’s pretty difficult to use Notion as a “brain-dump” site: it takes much too long to open. Google Keep or Apple Notes are better for that.

Secondly, Notion is quite heavily structured. Most of Notion is build around the idea of “databases”, which are basically superpowered tables, which means that data has to be shoehorned into tabular structured. This may not be suitable for people who like things like mind-maps; people who like more nebulous, creative connections between data may be better served by an app like Obsidian.

Here’s how I use Notion to help me study.

It’s pretty simple, to be honest; it’s not really taking advantage of all of Notion’s powers. I basically use one page for each topic I’m studying and I collate it in a bigger, “master” page. Each page has a series of “toggle” lists: lists that allow you to hide something inside of them. In my case, each point is a question that I use to revise, and the information that’s hidden is the answer to the question. This allows me to study using the Active Recall method; I look at a question, say the answer, and check if I’ve gotten it right.

2. Anki

Anki is an incredible life-saver of an application and anyone who has used it knows what I’m talking about

Anki is probably the best flashcard application ever made. It has apps on Android, iOS, Mac, Windows and web (although some of these apps are unofficial, and some are not free) and all of them have cross-platform support.

Anki also has incredible cloud sync (that’s stupidly reliable) as well as offline deck support (you can export and import card decks). This is made better by the incredible community of people continually making decks for Anki.

Anki’s superpower is the built-in spaced repetition. Spaced repetition is one of the best ways to remember things (by basically interrupting the forgetting curve) and Anki, based on how confident you are in certain facts, gives you a customised training regime for your deck. That is what makes Anki so much better than every other flashcard application, and the reason why I use it.

3. Excel

By far the least flashy (but also probably the most reliable software of the bunch) is Excel.

I use Excel as the home to my Retrospective Revision Timetable (see also: this Ali Abdaal video) mainly because it’s super easy to use and I don’t really need anything that’s more specialised. Excel works well, works reliably, and works intuitively.

Excel’s strength is, of course, reliability. With apps basically on all platforms, you basically don’t have to think about whether the platform is supported or not. Also, OneDrive sync is awesome.

Honestly, there’s nothing really special about excel (in this use case, that is) compared to Google Sheets, so you could do good enough using that too!

The way I use Excel is to keep a track of how many times I’ve revised a chapter, and how confident I am in it. Based on the timetable, I decide what to study that day; first, I study the chapter that I’m least confident in, then the second least, and so on. If I don’t have any ratings for confidence (or if the confidence ratings are similar), I revise the chapter that was learnt/revised the longest ago.

Hopefully this was helpful! Thanks for reading!

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