Ten ways to stay organized, from dead simple to mildly obsessive. You will not use all ten. Pick the ones you will actually maintain.
- Google Calendar: every deadline as an event, two alerts each. The backbone of everything below. - Apple Reminders or Google Keep: lists per school, the lowest-friction checklists on each platform. - Microsoft To Do or Todoist: cleaner tasks with due dates, projects per university, recurring portal checks. - Trello: a board per season, cards per task. - Notion: a real database of programs, deadlines, document status, portal links. Most setup, most visibility. - Evernote or Google Drive: notes and folders per school, scanned documents attached, consistent naming. Old reliable. - A dedicated tracker app: dates, documents, reminders in one place instead of four.
Three layers, one tool each: dates with alerts, tasks with checkboxes, documents with status. Weekly ten-minute Sunday review ties it together. ApplyCheck covers the dates-plus-documents layer with missing-item flags, $4.99 one-time.