Get Organized

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on July 05, 2011

Personal organizers are nothing new, but most of them are designed for businesspeople and are heavy with business-oriented features like client contact managers and meeting planners. Get Organized from JTK Solutions is different: it's optimized for students, especially secondary and college students. It helps busy students keep their assignments as well as keep track of their grades. Best of all, it's free, so impoverished scholars can download and use it and still be able to eat next week--maybe even food!

Get Organized opened with an optional Get Started dialog that walked us through the process of adding terms, courses, grading scales, textbook information, assignments, and events as well as sorting the list and viewing grades. Everything was clearly explained and easy to do, too. We started by adding our User Details, though, which includes contact data for both the student and the student's adviser. From the same dialog, we could also change the program's theme color and other settings, including color-coding for priorities and due dates. The main view has tabs for a List View of events and other entries and a Calendar view; the program also offers a smaller calendar view in the left-hand navigation panel. We right-clicked this panel, which opened the Terms and Courses wizard. Here we could add multiple terms and courses, including start and end dates and details. Entering and removing stuff is totally easy in Get Organized: just select Term, Course, Assignment, or Event, and then click Add. Pop-up wizards take care of the rest. Under Tools, we opened the Grades tool to configure our grading scale. Most functions offered hot key combos, too.

In addition to the Getting Started wizard, Get Organized offers a comprehensive online Help file with contact information. However, we quickly realized that Get Organized is a bit easier to use than many personal organizers we've tried. Part of this may be because, like a smart student, Get Organized doesn't take on a bigger load than it can handle. It has everything it needs to help students stay on top of their coursework and make it to every class on time without the complex extras found in enterprise-class planners. In fact, we think more than a few businesspeople would like Get Organized's no-frills, no-nonsense approach to organization.