Time management applications

I sometimes think that if I’d ever been taught to manage my time, I might not have dropped out of college the first time around. Luckily, by my second try I had pretty much taught myself.

Considering all the college kids out there who use Facebook, there should be some strong time management applications available. Here are a few I found that might help keep kids in school, or at least keep them from flunking Syntax.

First up is Projects. As the name suggests, this app is useful for helping you track some aspects of group projects, which would have been awesome in my salad days when meeting with a group for an assigned project meant running all over the dorms trying to track them down.  (You know, I really am not very old, I graduated like two years ago. I don’t know where these phrases like “salad days” come from.) You can open a new project in Projects, including title and description, invite other group members to join (as long as they’re your Facebook friends), and share files relating to the project. Files can be in several formats; I haven’t found the limits yet. (For example, can I upload videos? Until I get a better computer, we’ll never know. Or you could just test it yourself, of course.) There’s also a project Wall which allows group members to communicate on the page.

I love the design of this, it’s completely frill-free and very easy to use. You could easily use this to track every aspect of a project: meeting times can be scheduled on the Wall, and files upload quickly and are easy to see. I wouldn’t mind seeing a more specific scheduling aspect, though, to separate it from the other Wall conversations.

On that note, let us examine a social scheduling application called Timelight.  When using Timelight, your pre-formed choices for meetings are mostly about food and sports, which seems appropriate to my life since that’s mostly what I do when I meet up with people. There’s also a “Your Idea” option, and a few miscellaneous things like movies.

Here are some weird things about the application: When scheduling a meeting, fields to fill out include state and zip code. Now, I am pretty sure most people don’t schedule hang-outs in another state, so who is really collecting my data here? And what are they doing with it?

Also, I assumed that the “Your Idea” option in the “meeting type” field meant, you know, MY idea. But the app didn’t ask me for details, and now I realize it means my friend’s idea. I’m not sure there is an option for my idea. However, once you create the plan you have the option of entering a new name for it, so it’s not a big deal.

I like this app. I have a hard time keeping track of my appointments and it’s nice to have a fun tool that reminds me to, you know, hang out with my friends more. What bothers me is the insistence that “Timelight needs information about you in order to make better scheduling decisions.” As far as I can tell, I’m making all my scheduling decisions and Timelight is simply facilitating that. So why do they need to know, for example, what I do for a living?

However, the app promises not to show the info you enter to anyone, even your friends. It’s probably okay and I am unnecessarily paranoid about my data being stolen and sold to the Russians or whomever. And it’s a cool tool either way, so who’s complaining, right?

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