 In this video, we're going to have a look at tools for how to organize your study and work with others. So what are the things you are trying to get out of these tools? Well, you want to get more things done, but you also want to reduce the number of errors and the amount of tasks you miss. You want to be able to coordinate and collaborate with others, but also you want to find more time to do things. Maybe there are areas in your schedule that you can identify. Also, you want to improve the ability to focus, but also get more enjoyment out of the work that you're putting into your studies. And there are a few things you can do. You can, first things you should start thinking about, reducing the number of decisions. You should reduce the amount of time you use to look for things. And also, reduce the number of steps it takes to work with somebody. And we'll look at four areas in which you can apply some tools and techniques to help you with this. We'll talk about files and documents, managing appointments, projects, tasks, and collaborating with others. So let's first talk about how you can manage your files and documents. Well, there's mostly some useful tips you can use to make sure that you have everything well organized. Well, perhaps the most well-known is organizing the tree structure, use long and useful file names. But the less known tip is that you should number your files and folders. So this is the basic tip we will be given, make sure that everything is organized in nice nested trees like this. And that is very helpful because it helps you identify where things are. But actually, there are occasionally some limits to what you can do with that. The other thing you can do is number your files and folders. So you can see here, this is my list of sessions and my folders are numbered. And the reason I do that is not because one of them is more important, because I go to number one more often than to the others. But because they're always in the same place visually. So I don't have to scroll through a long list of files names and folder names because they are always there where I remember them from the last time. So that is a very useful tip and that will make things much more organized for you in the files you use. But an even more important thing is to give your files long and useful names. So instead of doing examples, make sure you put the whole reason, what are the examples for what are they for? And that's because long file names help discovery. And if you have a long file name, it also is helpful to have the first word to be somehow distinct, something that identifies the word because sometimes the file names are truncated. And it's also useful to have redundant names where there are certain things more than once. So for example, you can add things like icons. You can add dates to your file names and so on. Particularly if you have dates, it's useful to add a number as well as the name of the month. And as I already said, you can add picture and emojis to your file names. And once you have done that, you can actually reduce the effort and time it takes you to find files by searching for them. So for example, in Windows, you can simply hit the window key and start typing. So you can bring up the app to open PowerPoint or you can look for a template file like here and then open that directly from here. So instead of going through your file structure, you can very easily access your documents that way and it's going to reduce the amount of time you are looking for them. It's still important to have the file structure because that helps you think about how things fit together. But then to reduce the amount of time it takes you to find them, use the search. Now the next area we can look at is how to manage the different appointments, events, tasks, and projects that you deal with in the course of your study. And again, this is a fairly straightforward and well-known area. Everybody's using a calendar or a task manager. But one thing that can actually help you quite a bit is use colors to help you visually identify different blocks of time. So this is actually my own color coding for my calendar where I use different colors to identify different types of events. I can see at a glance, this is a lecture that I'm attending. This is somewhere I am doing some teaching. This is where I'm having an out-of-office meeting, and then different places around the building where I may have meetings. So that's a very simple trick that you may use to help you with your calendar management. But then there are a whole lot of other categories of tools that you can use to help you manage your projects and your tasks. And there are task managers, one well known as Todoist and there are also Microsoft Todoist, there's Anidoo, there's Tic-Tic. And these things are primarily intended for individuals managing their tasks. Then there are project management tools such as a Trello, that's one of the best known ones. There's a Microsoft planner that we already mentioned, Notion. And we'll mention it again. Todoist also actually now allows you to manage projects as well as Tic-Tic. So there is a bit of an overlap between task managers and project managers nowadays. But you can also use mind mappers and outliners to help you manage your tasks. So Mindomo has a task management function, but check this that we've also mentioned in a previous video. And many other outliners also allow you to manage your tasks. So that may be something that will work for you. And also many note-taking apps actually have a nice feature that you can manage tasks or even projects. So Notion was already mentioned under project management. And it's actually a fairly decent task manager as well, but you can also keep track of your tasks and to-dos in Google Keep or OneNote. So even your note-taking apps may serve you as a place to keep track of your task. And you have to balance some of the pros and cons of using these different tools. One thing that you may want to also do is look at how you're actually using your time. There are various time managers, time trackers that will look at your computer use and your phone use. For example, toggle harvest or rescue time and they will give you a better picture of how you're using your time. So that is something that you may also find useful. And when you're looking at all of these tools for managing your time, there are a few features you should always be on the lookout for. So first, can they sync? So you probably have more than one device. You probably have a phone and a computer at least, maybe even a tablet. So you would like to have all your tasks always available on all of them. So make sure that you can synchronize. What about the number of levels into which you can nest your notes and your tasks? So that often can be some limits of how many levels of outline can you have. So that's something to keep in mind. Now if it's something that you're mostly keeping your personal tasks and you want to be reminded, what sort of alerts are there? So many, most task managers will contain some sort of a time-based alerts. But they're also, for example, like Google Keep will give you an alert when you come to this particular location with your phone. And finally, what are the collaboration options? So some task managers are better for working on your own. Some are primarily intended for team management. And you have to make a decide on what are your priorities here. Now speaking of collaboration, we also want to think about how we can collaborate on documents more efficiently because that's a lot of the time we're working on a document with somebody else. And the thing that helps us here is Microsoft Office 365 that has all the right tools that help us work with others collaborate on documents. So Office 365 is the umbrella term, but there's one drive for synchronizing your files together, sharing folders, forms for collating information together. There's teams, you can use for communication, SharePoint for organization, OneNote for collaborative note-taking. And essentially what you want to get away from is ever sending an email back and forth with a file attachment. And all the Microsoft apps have a share button. So instead of sending the document by email, simply click on the share button and then you can choose who you want to share the document with. So for example, you can even make the document available to anyone with the link so that they can, so anybody in the world can collaborate with you without having to have access to a Microsoft account. And then if you would like to manage the way you're sharing your documents, you can use these three dots at the top and choose manage access. And then you can rescind access and give different, change the permission. So for example, one of the things you can hear, you can decide what you want to allow. Editing of the document you're sharing or just viewing, you can add a password, send an expiration date. And so on. Now once you have done that, then you will see as you collaborate in a document, then all of a sudden when you're working with others, you see that these other people are popping up on there. And you can all edit the document at the same time or asynchronously as well. So you can see there's one person here, there's another person there, and everybody is editing at the same time. And you can also manage your comments. So here, somebody has some comments on this particular word. And then you can have a conversation about this. And then finally, when you're done with the conversation, you can click Resolve and that will conclude that discussion. So you can even continue your discussions inside the document rather than sending an email back and forth as well. And this also allows you, by using these tools, you can edit documents inside the browser. So for example, this is inside using Microsoft Teams, but this is also, this is just simply opening that same document inside a browser. Now the great thing about all of this is that not only you can use, you can manage these files on the web, but you can also synchronize them all to your computer. So you can have all of your computers can have those same files available to you as well, so that is very important. There's one word of warning, by default, they are not all the files are actually copied into your file. So if you ever need to be offline, if that happens to you very often, for example, if you're on a plane or train that doesn't have access to Wi-Fi, you won't want to make sure that you take your right click on the folder or file and say, always keep on this device. Otherwise, it may require that you access it online as well, even though it is listed in your files. Now, as I mentioned, there are other tools that you can use for collaboration and for editing documents together. And the one that I've been mentioning throughout these videos is Notion. Notion actually allows you to have fairly simple project management. Many people are really starting switching, starting to switch to Notion for project management. And you can even use, you can use many of the features for management practice, but you can also collaborate on documents, on creating data databases, and you can share these things to the web. So that is another tool that I think you may want to consider as you're looking for ways of collaborating with others on documents. So thank you, and in the final and next video, we're going to look at workflows.