
Can you remember the times when we didn’t rely on AI in every aspect of our lives? Those times, when we had to Google everything instead of asking ChatGPT? The second option undoubtedly saves you time and effort now. Still, even back then, we had tools that helped us increase productivity and the quality of our work. Some haven’t survived the competition over the years, while others have adapted to our changing needs and keep helping us overcome the most unexpected challenges. Let’s explore various tools with the highest chance to simplify your academic journey in 2025.
Custom Writings
Students worldwide are asked to prepare essays on a wide range of topics, which may seem manageable at first glance. Especially nowadays, when ChatGPT is always ready to assist you with brainstorming. Nevertheless, requirements for different types of paper may seem overwhelming and even impossible to meet without human expertise. Services like CustomWritings are the opposite of modern AI-powered tools since they offer the assistance of real experts. Professional writers work with various citation styles and rely on reliable checkers to avoid any form of plagiarism. You may consider turning to such services for editing problematic parts of your essay, proofreading, creating outlines, preparing reference lists, and much more. Just start by stating the problem to yourself to target it effectively.
Grammarly
Grammarly has been around since 2009 as a reliable writing and editing assistant, and it remains competitive nowadays. Integrating AI guidance hasn't changed its initial functions, such as correcting grammar and punctuation mistakes and providing style recommendations. Here, you can check your essay’s readability and its correspondence to the desired academic level. Although functions like a plagiarism checker are available only in the pro version, you can still benefit even from a regular one. Proofreading your papers with Grammarly will save you time and effort and indicate improvement areas. For instance, you may stick to sentences with a similar structure without noticing this nuance, which makes your writing monotonous and less engaging. Grammarly specializes in identifying similar patterns and helping you address them.
Zotero
Zotero is another available tool that can help you perfect your essays and research. It has a separate section for creating quick bibliographies and an extended version that organizes sources according to your personalized settings. Zotero can also help you with annotation and research sharing. The preparatory stage for any project makes you browse through multiple articles. You may find only a few useful ones or several dozen publications that you may need later. This is where Zotero steps in, since with it you can save useful articles with a click and sort documents into collections. You can also add keyword tags to simplify the search later. Remarkably, Zotero synchronizes your data across devices so you won’t lose notes in case of emergencies.
Google Drive
Years pass, and alternatives emerge, but Google Drive remains one of the best storage options for your documents. It supports various formats and synchronizes with all your devices, which means you won’t lose access to critical data no matter where you are. Students also tend to underestimate the collaboration potential of Google Drive, so let’s explore such options. While creating or transporting a document, you can share access with a single person or with anyone who would receive the link. You can choose whether those people will be able to view your files, leave comments, or even edit documents in real time. Such features are equally useful at the brainstorming stage and later on, when you need to proofread or check something.
Notion
Notion is a workspace with various features, so let’s start by outlining how you can use it for taking notes. You can create tables, boards, galleries, timelines, and much more according to your needs and share those materials with your team, which makes Notion a perfect tool for group projects. You can assign tasks and schedule events on the calendar. While your data synchronizes across devices, you can also use Notion offline. The section with Notion AI is meant for extending and editing your notes. Here, you can turn separate ideas into a complete paper or continue the brainstorming whenever you need assistance. Notion is also useful when you need to maintain a particular style across your documents.
Office Lens
Office Lens is a free scanner app that you may need to work with various types of media. This tool can take pictures of printed documents, whiteboards, recipes, sticky notes, and business cards, and then help you convert the data into digital documents. The search function is especially useful for projects that require you to process loads of various information. You may do this traditionally, but relying on Office Lens will minimize the likelihood of human factor mistakes and save your time. This tool integrates with other Microsoft products, so combining it with OneNote makes perfect sense.
Todoist
Finally, let’s talk about an app that will boost your productivity by assisting you with planning and maintaining focus. According to studies, the frequency of smartphone checks directly correlates with cognitive failures. The thing is, our brain inevitably struggles to switch between multiple tasks, and similar distractions reduce our ability to focus on something critical. Ironically or not, planning with Todoist can help you manage this and other chaotic habits and build new ones, like focusing on studying during certain hours or going on regular walks. All Todoist versions have limitations, but even a free plan provides enough features to systematize your daily tasks.
To conclude
Of course, we didn’t mention all the tools and apps that can assist you on your academic journey. However, the listed ones can become a solid base for your further research. By combining various tools, you’ll discover what features you still lack and what functions are less useful than you’ve expected. Only experimenting can help you pick tools that truly meet your needs, so never give up on trying something new. Eventually, you’ll develop an ultimate system that will boost the efficiency and quality of your work in the long term.
Media Contact
Company Name: CustomWritings
Contact Person: Andrew Juma
Email: Send Email
Country: Cyprus
Website: ca.customwritings.com