5 Apps To Get You Through Michaelmas

As anyone who knows me will tell you, I love myself a good app. I’m obsessed. And why not? Who wouldn’t love a little piece of technological goodness to make the days go more quickly (and in a slightly more organized fashion).

1. Sleep Cycle 

Everyone hates mornings, and no-one more than me. There’s nothing worse than being hauled from your bed, mid-dream by your alarm clock (which you put on the other side of the room, to facilitate getting up).

Sleep Cycle is the solution for you! You set your alarm time and leave it running whilst you’re asleep. It tracks your sleep cycle (by how you move) and wakes you up sometime before your wakeup time, when it thinks you’re as awake as possible. It even gives you nice wake up tones to gently draw you from your slumber. Never again need you be brutally disrupted from a naughty Chris-Hemsworth-as-Thor dream by the incessant howling of your alarm.

2. Clear 

It’s a to-do list. But a pretty to-do list at that. You can create multiple lists, and it rewards your productivity with new backgrounds, colour schemes etc.

The key to surviving Cambridge University is to write shit down. WRITE IT ALL DOWN. And Clear is the best way to do that. (Also, having productivity apps gives you a legitimate excuse for tapping away on your phone in lectures. For all they know, you’re enthusiastically taking down all those extra reading suggestions.)

3. Pomodoro 

The Pomodoro Technique (meaning tomato in Italian, for the linguists) is focused on productivity and effective time management.

The idea: you work for 25 minutes, then break for 5. And so on and so forth. I did this when ploughing my way through the mind-numbling, crisis-inducing work that is Sartre’s La Nausée. (Spoiler alert: life is meaningless). The app is essentially a simple timer that allows you to *try* to work productively instead of staring out of the window for 70-80% of your study time. (Okay, you can still do that, but doing it with a timer may at least bring that number down to around 50%).

4. Tribesports 

Trying to get fit? Want to boast about your workout without incurring the wrath of your entire Facebook audience? Well, Tribesports is the answer.

Once you’ve registered, you can create online fitness challenges and take those that others have set. For the unfit amongst us, the challenges also start at basic level. We’re thinking: ‘Drink a glass of water’. If nothing else, do it for the ego boost.

5. Tinder 

Okay, so this one isn’t strictly study-related, but it’ll become a central part of your life from the fateful moment of download.

For those who don’t know, Tinder allows you to judge people, ‘liking’ or ‘disliking’ them with the mere swipe of a screen. If they ‘like’ you back, you can ahem chat. Now even if random hookups with men from the internet aren’t your thing (no judgement here), words cannot describe how therapeutic it is to sit in the café on one of your numerous study breaks, silently judging people: it’s like being on Take Me Out, except you can do it in your pyjamas, make up-free, whilst cradling a hot beverage of some description. Additionally, the messages received from matches provide never-ending comedy. (My personal favorite: ‘Can you handle someone with a serious horse obsession?’ Erm…no.)

So there we have it: apps are the answer! I can think of very few problems, within reason, that a good ol’ app cannot solve. Now, when your week 5 crisis inevitably hits (there’s really nothing to be done), at least you can blame it on your phone this time.