There's a lot to keep track of while you're a student. Lecture notes, exam dates, essays and group projects -- it's more than most human brains can handle on their own. If you're the type of person that struggles to stay organized or who wants to finesse an already-robust productivity system, read on. We've broken down the best organizational tools that can help you stay on top of academic life, including note-taking apps, calendars and to-do list software. If you have a personal favorite that hasn't made our shortlist, let us know in the comments.

Important emails have a habit of arriving at inconvenient times. Boomerang is a plugin for Gmail, Outlook and Android that lets you temporarily dismiss messages from your inbox, to reappear in a few hours or days when you're better able to deal with them. You can also pause your inbox entirely, to suspend the torrent of interruptions while you're busy, and schedule outgoing messages to be sent at specified times. You get 10 free uses a month; after that, monthly subscriptions start at $5. The idea couldn't be simpler: you set up a list of possible dates and times and then your invitees drop by the Doodle website and tick the options that work for them. You'll quickly be able to see at a glance when everyone is available and since recipients don't need to create their own Doodle accounts, it's friction-free.

Don't like the built-in options that come with Android and iOS? You've got a plethora of third-party reminder apps to pick from. While we can't cover all of them here, we will highlight some of the best ones we've found. Feel free to do your own investigating as well. First up is Microsoft's Cortana digital assistant, available for Android and iOS.

Todoist's latest upgrade is one that will benefit the busiest of task list-addled users. It's added two-way sync between its task lists and Google Calendar. This means that not only can you see, sort and prioritise tasks from inside your calendar (on the web, or on your app), but that any changes made will also flow back to your Todoist account. The team reckon it'll help busy users to plan out bigger projects, as they'll be better equipped to keep an eye on -- and plan for -- milestones along the way. It'll also cleverly block off time in your gCal schedule to ensure you bake in time for myriad projects and tasks. Once you authorize the integration of Todoist with your Google account, any existing tasks with due dates and times will be automatically added to your Google Calendar.

The folks at Doist, the company behind the popular productivity app Todoist, regularly add features to help boost its users' workflows. After tasking Alexa with the ability to add items to lists last month, the company has an update for its stable of apps that will help you stay on top of your obligations with the help of AI. The latest version of Todoist includes Smart Schedule, a feature that analyzes factors like task urgency, how you've completed items in the past and your upcoming workload before suggesting a due date for an item. Doist says it researched how users postpone tasks in what it calls a "snowball," constantly pushing things to the next day or week until their to-do list is packed with dozens of items. This editor is certainly guilty of that.

Todoist is one of the more full-featured to-do services out there, and it's available on nearly every platform out there. Whether you use Mac or Windows, iOS or Android, Todoist has you covered. It works much like you'd expect: you can ask Alexa to add items to the various lists that you have in your Todoist account, and you can also ask it to tell you everything that's on your to-do list for that day. And Alexa works with Todoist's natural language processing, so you can ask it to add things to your list "tomorrow" or "next Wednesday" and it'll know just what you're asking it for. It's not clear if you'll be able to tell Alexa to add items to specific projects or to-do lists in your account -- they probably get added to whatever your default list is for you to sort out on your phone or computer.

This article published last week at Wired is rather alarmingly titled "Why Can't Anyone Make a Decent Freaking To-do App?" It looks at how the majority of the consumer public is not getting value from the litany of task management software options available out there, and contends that many people are returning to paper to help them: Most of the myriad to-do list apps are fine. Some of them are very good. But none of them has ever solved my problem--your problem--of having too much to do, too little time to do it, and a brain incapable of remembering and prioritizing it all. Which explains why the old ways remain so popular. I'm not sure there I agree that there are "no freaking decent to-do apps," but I take the writer's point. It does seem surprising that, at this late date, we still don't have a clear winner in a software category that seeks to fulfill such a basic, universal human need.