I have been a sessional academic since 2014. During this time I’ve been completing my Doctoral thesis and being actively involved in several animal protection groups in various capacities.
I am also fairly lazy (just ask my partner, Aimee).
So doing things as efficiently as possible has been a long-standing interest of mine, even before returning to university. One of my goals in starting this blog is to share with you some of the more useful apps that you may like to integrate into your teaching/researching so you can spend more time researching, writing and otherwise having a life outside of academia.
I don’t claim to be some productivity guru. I am not. I have lost days being painfully unproductive. What I do know, is that I am generally more productive than ever before and this is due, in part, to the software I use.
We live in the golden age of apps. App development for Mac and iOS has become a lot simpler since the introduction of Swift, Apple Inc’s open source programming software, in 2014. Since then, it seems like everyone has turned their hand to app development. I have even been tempted to develop a few app ideas I have, but that is for another post.
As a starting point, I should outline the apps that I currently use. In subsequent posts, I will explain why I have chosen one app over the other and how it can benefit those working in academia. I hope to hear from some of you regarding other apps I may have overlooked.
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In BETA but still my task management app of choice. More on this later.
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For emails. Excellent new integration with Evernote.
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As a repository for everything.
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I have snippets for emails and marking work.
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For custom keyboard shortcuts for common and repetitive tasks such as inserting a footnote into Scrivener.
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For web-based articles I come across but don’t have time (or the inclination) to read now.
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My word processor of choice for long-form documents, especially when using the Australian Legal Guide to Citation in footnotes. So much much stable than MS Word.
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Citation software for the Australian Guide to Legal Citation and digital repository for all academic sources.
For accessing and annotating my digital academic library on the go. |
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For digitising hard-copy book chapters/ articles.
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For OCR’ing scanned documents.
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For tracking the time taken on specific tasks. Especially valuable when I need to submit timesheets for marking or research assistant work.
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