10 Steps to Earning Awesome Grades (While Studying Less)

Use Great Tools to Be More Effective
This is the part you’ve really been waiting for, right? The part where I tell you 
about wonderful apps that’ll make group projects nothing but sunshine and 
rainbows?
Cool. That’s exactly what I’ll do here.
I’ve been experimenting with collaboration tools ever since high school, when I 
pissed off my fellow Business Professionals of America officers by trying to get 
them to use Basecamp. I guess they just wanted to stick with email.
Eight years later, I’m of the same opinion I was back then: email sucks. It’s a 
never-ending hydra that’s already tough enough to do battle with; you don’t 
need team communication clogging it up further. It wasn’t built for managing 
projects.
The apps I’m about to suggest, however, were. 
Here’s an overview (all are free):
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Trello: Project/task management
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Slack: Team communication
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Google Docs: Collaborative writing, file sharing
Trello
Trello
 is my absolute favorite app for managing projects of any kind. It utilizes 
Kanban cards, which are part of a Japanese project management system 
developed at Toyota. This system lets you easily track the status of any task in a 
project, and Trello adds in lots of other useful features.

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10 Steps to Earning Awesome Grades (While Studying Less)
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When I hired Martin to help code the redesigned version of my website back in 
late 2013, we set up a Trello board for the project. It was massively helpful, as 
there were a ton of things to keep track of.
On a Trello board, you can create any number of lists, which in turn can hold 
any number of cards. Typically, a project will utilize these features like so:
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