16 weeks ago, a car full of tech and t-shirts set off on an little adventure across the UK known as Anywhere Working Week 2013 (was it really that long ago?). On day 3 of the week, we arrived in Tavistock and met Cesi D’Alessio a young student who is off to University in September but already has a firm grip on the career and lifestyle he wants to achieve.

We got in touch with Cesi to find out what words of wisdom he could share with students looking to kickstart their academic routine.

—

Flexible working is flourishing across the country at the moment, being able to access data from anywhere is becoming increasingly important and has made its way into the workplace. However, for some people, e.g. students like me this will be a factor from day one.

I would like to go through a great service as a student and young entrepreneur that allows me to connect with the world from anywhere and also be as productive as possible.

Evernote has 65M users worldwide and is one of the top productivity services in the world. Allowing you to make notes, reminders and also save clips from the websites has become an efficient and routine way of organising my life.

When I started using the service around 3/4 years ago, I was in my GCSE exam phase, I had a lot of information to retain and I discovered Evernote when someone mentioned in through Twitter, I was taking every opportunity at the time to find ways of making processes easier.

This was a saviour at the time, a location that I could babble my notes down, take photos of my class notes, make to do lists and bung in every website clip or online notes that my teachers had recommended. I sorted these all into Notebooks based on each subject as well as other notebooks for personal and social.

I was developing almost a second brain that improved my productivity with every task, as I didn’t have to search my memory for thoughts I had last week but refer back to my Evernote and pull everything together to make things more effective.

“When talking to friends over the years about their study planning, many of them complained about not having a good method of collecting information and storing it.”

Comments such as “How do you get so much done?” were very common and I talked them through the service to try and pass on how to use it. Luckily I was able to find this secret weapon very early on and I would recommend it to people starting the upper years in the education as it has the potential to double productivity.

The service is also neat when it comes to working anywhere. Evernote is a Cloud Service, This means that it can be accessed anywhere where you have Internet Access (3G, WiFi etc). It also has a fantastic multiplatform application, allowing you to access Evernote offline and online on almost every device with an app store.

This has been so beneficial to my working habits, being able to access it on my tablet, phone, and computer and also other touch devices I own

“Allowing me to be able to work in my local cafe on projects coming home and having the information available to continue using has been awesome!”

Also the offline access feature has been great when going abroad as I have been able to write up notes and add photos to the service, then when I return home for it to sync with the service all the notes I have made.

It truly has increased my productivity by limits I never thought were possible and I can be very organised and effective in all activities not solely academic but social and personal.

I think if everyone had this weapon in their education years, there would be a lot less complaining about organisation and a lot more doing.

—

Thanks Cesi, best of luck with the exam results!

Check out my last productivity post for more apps to get your teeth into, including One Note* and Dropbox.

Microsoft Office 365 is a productivity ninja’s best friend, with One Note* included, Publisher, Access the works! Check out the free trial and let us know how you get on.