Nothing indicates the start of a new academic year like the reappearance of heavy textbooks, caffeine binges and abnormal sleep cycles. BUT, armed with your smartphone and/or tablet and the right apps, you won’t have to suffer through all-nighters and exams alone

According to a 2015 study conducted by McGraw-Hill Education, 77 percent of students reported that using tablets and smartphones has helped improve their grades, and 62 percent said that tech helps them feel more prepared for class. Here are 7 FREE apps that should help you navigate the fine line between productivity and procrastination

Evernote

Evernote has long been one of the most popular note-taking apps, but recent updates give users even more to love. The clean, uncomplicated interface makes it perfect for students – you can take notes, make to-do lists, set reminders, attach files, create agendas and access everything through any device. Evernote doesn’t have a storage limit, but free users are limited to an upload limit of 60 MB per month. You also have to turn on push notifications to sync all your notes when the app isn’t running. The camera feature is especially helpful, letting you save any photo, document, Post-it note or business card

Pocket

Pocket is an interesting application used to save articles, web pages and videos for later reading or viewing. It’s available for major smartphone platforms (iOS and Android) and PCs. Just like the Evernote app, it also syncs files across all your devices at once. It can also save articles and web pages for offline reading

Dropbox

As a student, you save, send and lose a lot of files — usually in the depths of your inbox. The free Dropbox Mobile app lets you store and share up to 2GB of documents, photos and videos in one secure location. It’s easy to add notes to files you want to share, too, which is ideal for when your group project seems to be taking forever. Recently, Dropbox partnered with Microsoft so that users can edit Microsoft Office files directly from their mobile phones and save them to their Dropbox accounts

You should also keep an eye on Dropbox Paper, a collaboration platform that allows multiple people to edit the same document

iWork Suite

For Apple users, the iWork Suite is the best productivity tool they can use in creating essays, presentations, and spreadsheets. The app has similar features to the Microsoft Office Suite. Pages allows users to create documents where they can alter tables, insert pictures, and add hyperlinks to their text. Numbers is similar to Microsoft Excel; Keynote is the presentation creator. iWork Suite is compatible with the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. It’s free for new iDevices running iOS 7 including the iPhone 5c

EasyBib

EasyBib takes over one of the most time-consuming parts of writing a research paper — the bibliography. This app helps you format your list of references in more than 7,000 citation styles (who even knew 7,000 styles existed?), including the most common APA and MLA formats. Just type in the name of the book and EasyBib gives you several options to choose from and then makes a citation for you. EasyBib has a website that does the job just as well, but with the app you can take a picture of a book’s bar code and generate a citation for it

My Study Life

This app replaces any paper planner by keeping track of your workload across multiple platforms and devices. Manage your timetable with week and day timetables, keep track of tasks and exams in the cloud and receive notifications to keep you up to date with exam schedules and classes. A clean interface and the ability to colour code your classes make the calendar easy to read

Spending Tracker

In the midst of pulling all-nighters and juggling extracurricular activities, budgeting is often the last thing on your mind – which is probably why you find your funds completely nonexistent more often than not. Spending Tracker is a money-managing app that helps you create a budget, track your spending and even calculate your credit score. Best of all, it’s free. Consider this the equivalent of £3 more to spend on a late-night curry!