Yesterday, our team lead at Lambda School recommended some apps to our group for taking notes during the course and for keeping track of how long we took to complete projects. Here is a list of these applications:

Note-taking:

• Notion: Our team lead said that Notion has essentially replaced Evernote. One feature it has over Evernote is that is has a searchable database of some sort.
• Evernote: I’ve been using this for years, on the desktop and my phone. I mainly use it to take quick notes for a variety of things, keep lists of important things and to track when I fed the baby and how many ounces she drank.
• OneNote: Its comprehensive, but I have no experience with it yet.
• Bear: I also have no experience with this – and its an Apple-only product.

Time-tracking:

• Clockify: Our team lead highly recommended this. He uses it for everything. He said that we can time ourselves when we’re doing projects to see how long they take us, and as we repeat certain functions, we can see how much we’ve improved by noting the duration completing certain tasks now takes us. He uses it for more though – like seeing how long he slept, and other things.
• Marinara: Pomodoro Assistant: This one’s a Chrome extension. Pomodoro is a technique in which a person spends a certain amount of concentrated time working/studying and then takes a short break to get up and move around and clear his/her mind. I read about it a few years ago. I think it was something like 25 mins of focused effort and then 5 mins away. Its supposed to increase productivity and reduce burnout. I think our team lead said that he uses 45 mins of focused work and then 5 mins away.

As an aside, he also recommended that if we rewatch video tutorials, we consider increasing the speed. I’ve seen other people on YouTube make the same recommendation. Setting a video’s playback speed to 1.5 or 2X might be a bit much, but apparently, speed can be increased in smaller increments as well, like 1.1 or 1.2. I’ll experiment with this later. He said that its useful for rewatching lectures that run 2-3 hours long.