Are
you looking to have a productive semester of college where you learn
a lot, get your solo and group projects done faster, slay your
finals, and still have time for socializing, eating healthy not-pizza
foods, and yes, watching sloth videos? Then the startup community has
the tools you need!
At
Meta Search, the startup I work at, we do a lot of collaborative work, and
that means we need to communicate well, stay on the same page about
where everyone's at on our tasks, and keep track of all the changes
in our software. For that we use some sweet productivity software to
coordinate getting our code out rapidly, and I definitely could have
used that software when I was at Tufts!
I never learned productivity techniques
in college, so to get A's I ended up packing in lots of inefficient
study hours, becoming an energy drink connoisseur, and having really
stressful finals weeks. If you've been on that struggle bus, read on
to turn that struggle bus into a struggle bullet train!
Got a college group project
and want more convenient communication than just group texting? Wish
your class had an online chat room for setting up study groups or
wrapping your head around a tough part of the lecture? Wanna start a
forum for your off-campus housemates? Then get your classmates on Slack!
Slack is like a much
classier version of a chat room or forum, and it's easy to start a
Slack team for a group you're in. If you're on a Slack team with your
classmates, you can use Slack to talk about stuff you're figuring out
during studying, share jokes and quotable moments in the class, and
figure out where and when you and your group project partners can
meet up.
At Meta, we collaborate a
lot by sending direct messages to each other through Slack. So we
Slack each other questions about the tasks we're on, we send snippets
of the code we want to point out in our massive codebase, and we link
each other to blog posts about new concepts and technologies we're
interested in using in our code. Slack also lets you
integrate your chat room with a lot of other sites. For example, we
hooked up our GitHub repositories to our #dev channel, so if there's
a change in the code, everyone hears about it! This makes it much
easier for us to stay on the same page on where everyone's at.
Besides getting work done,
though, we use our #food channel to announce when there's free food
somewhere in the office (almost every day), our #product channel for
talking about our web design, and our #general and #random channels
for socializing and sharing funny pictures and videos. But you know
what else is great about using Slack to communicate? CUSTOM EMOJI!
@ProductHunt @SlackHQ @jkupferman ...when the @metasearch team discovered custom slack emojis 😂 pic.twitter.com/WULGZDl7sU— Emily Pavlini (@emilypavlini) December 18, 2015
We've
all had group projects that end up with all the work piled on right
before the due date, or slowed down because not everyone's on the
same page or because it's hard to find a time to meet. But it's easy to see what needs to get done and divide it up, if you write it down on a Trello board!
At
Meta, we use Trello boards primarily to organize a scrum workflow; we
break up the work into 2-week sprints, writing a card on the board
for each task, and then assigning them to different members of the
team. During a sprint, we have a list of the cards for what needs to
get done, which we drag from the backlog to the in progress list when
we start it and the done pile when we finish.
For
an example of a Trello board, here's a board of me and my dog Lola
writing one of my programming tutorials.
Another
great feature of Trello is that on each card you can make checklists
and check things off as you go, so if you're not sure where to get
started on a card, you can break it down into a checklist to figure
out where to start, useful for both solo and group projects, or for
figuring out what things you need to study before an exam and when
you need to go to office hours. Not knowing what needs to get done is
the worst for studying and can run up your late night pizza delivery
bills, so use Trello to save time on figuring that out!
Here's
an example of a Trello checklist on one of my dog Lola's Trello cards
from when I was writing my last blog post.
Most
projects in college are only about the length of one or two scrum
sprints, but the short length makes planning and staying on the same
page critical. The best group projects I had when I was at Tufts were
the ones where we were required to plan the project before getting
cracking, and for that, Trello's got your back!
By
the way, Lola really did learn how to toodle-oo on that checklist!
Ever have a project you step away from for a while only to come back to it later and have no idea where you saved your files? Or you ever have a syllabus with a non-descript filename get buried in your Documents folder… or was it your Google Drive account? I've been there, done that, and digging through all my folders was the worst, especially if it's a file with a long loading time. Luckily, Meta makes finding those files easier than ever to find by tagging them, making finding them as easy as typing into a search bar!
You
can use Meta to search the files on your hard drive if you're using
it on a Mac, but besides
searching
on your own computer, you
can integrate your Meta
account with other sites
where your files might be, like your Google Drive, Gmail, Dropbox,
and Evernote.
Additionally, Meta also has integrations for Slack and Trello, so you
can search for files, posts, and code snippets you Slacked to your
teammates on a project,
or search for specific cards on your Trello boards.
The really cool thing about
Meta is that because your files get tagged, you don't even need to
know the name of the file to search for it, just some idea of what's
in the file. To give you an idea of the tags we got, here are the
tags on a tutorial I made for my blog!
Besides the tags we
generate, though, you can also add your own custom tags, so you could
tag files with which chapter your notes were from, what class a file
is for, or do this:
The average worker spends 4
hours a week looking for or rebuilding their files. So hook up Meta
to your accounts and get #4extrahours to study, socialize… or watch
sloth videos!
Have an #EpicSemester, and stay slothful!
((.(⊙ω⊙)((.
