Joey’s Productivity Toolkit!
Studying at CMU is no trivial task, preparing for job interviews isn’t one either. Here are a set of tools I used to maximize my productivity.
Todoist:
Is a todo list tool with some neat features like re-scheduling and a fully functional chrome and mobile app. The free version is already power-packed but the pro version adds the reminder functionality which is super useful.
Google Calendar Plugin
This plugin for Chrome allows you to create a calendar event by typing in a sentence like, “Meeting with James at 3pm on Wednesday” It also lets you scroll through upcoming meeting right within your browser,
Huntr
Huntr is a job search tracker board. It’s useful to track where you are in the interview process as compared to using a spreadsheet
Grammarly
No matter how good you are at the language, you might end up making grammatical errors in a hurry, Grammarly can help you be error-proof at your top speed.
Danger Zone!!!!
These tools are more of the dark magic stuff I’ve used, proceed with caution.
1-click Timer for chrome
It’s easy to get distracted on the web and lose track of time. 1 click timer for chrome gives you a small timer in your address bar that helps you limit the time you spend on a single task. Set a timer when you start a task and when the timer ends, drop what you’re doing and switch to another task.
Beeminder
Beeminder is an app that charges you some cash if you don’t reach your daily/weekly goals. There are other products out there that donate to an org you like or hate if you don’t reach your goal.
The goals can be anything like jogging to a spot and back, writing a few lines in a journal etc.
I hated solving leetcode problems more than anything else, so I wrote a python webserver that forced me to solve at least 4 problems a day and would charge me 15 bucks if I missed a single day. Ping me in the comments if you want me to dedicate an article to how I did it.
StayFocusd
StayFocusd is a chrome plugin that can restrict the time you spend on a particular website. For me, it was youtube, facebook that needed some control.
