Simple and privacy preserving project management for students

Being a student is a stressful time in ones life. Constant deadlines loom, exams, study groups and an overload of information all contribute. What’s needed is something to manage that complexity, for some it’s physical organization tools like diaries and calendars, for others they opt for simple todo lists via Trello.

We want to present another option for students that we feel is a real benefit (and one we wished we’d had while studying).

Portabella is a privacy friendly, end-to-end encrypted project management solution. That means we support a bunch of ways to organise and plan work you need to do, all while knowing as little about you as possible.

We don’t want to know what your next assignment is about, and even if we did, what gives us the right to know? With Portabella your data is encrypted before it leaves your browser.

Highlights for students

Portabella involves many options for managing your work but we’ll be highlighting a few here that really stand out for students.

Kanban boards

This may sound a bit exotic to you, however a kanban board is an excellent management solution for all kinds of planning you want to do. It boils down to naming a bunch of columns (we’ll name ours ToDo, Doing and Done) and moving your tasks between those columns based on the status of them.

This sounds primitive but really gets you 99% of the way there when it comes to planning things. As a student deep work and concentration is vital, that means thinking about what you’re studying at the time, not trying to remember when an assignment is due three weeks from now.

Calendars

A necessary evil of student life is deadlines, whether it’s end of semester exams or a date you need to hand in the group project by. With our calendar view you can specifically assign dates and times to tasks, this allows a better overview of what needs to be done when and allows you to prioritize.

This tied in with our rich notification system means you can create tasks months in advance and be alerted closer to the time when they’re due.

Knowledge base

The final tool we want to highlight for students is our knowlege base feature, or documents. These are exactly what they sound like, text files you can format until your hearts content with all kinds of interesting information.

• Want to write your thesis without giving it to Google or Microsoft along the way?
• Need to document that process you never remember how to do correctly?
• Want a place to just jott down notes during lectures?

Our documents feature has you covered.

Pricing

For many, being a student is the most financially strapped time of their lives. To that end we want to make it as easy as possible for students to access high quality tools. In concrete terms that means:

• 70% off for students and non-profits
• pricing based on purchasing power.

We don’t feel the need to explain our 70% discount, however let’s touch on purchasing power for a minute. We all know that money isn’t valued the same everywhere in the world. $5USD represents a vastly different amount to someone in the US versus someone in the Philippines for example. To that end we’ll price match based on how powerful your currency.

Hopefully you find this as simple, transparent and inclusive as we do.

Privacy

It goes without saying that most students study to then do something with that knowledge, either in direct application of it or not. As a result it’s important to start your journey off correctly and safely. Storing your data in applications that aren’t end-to-end encrypted is analogous to posting your whole life on social media. It’s important to assume something that could be leaked, will be leaked.

Using Portabella is a safe guard that nothing you ever write will come back to haunt you in your future career.

To that end we’d also encourage you to get on board with other end-to-end encrypted applications such as Signal or Threema. We at Portabella use these ourselves and only recommend things we truly believe to be secure.

Give Portabella a go today!

Hopefully those points above were enough to convince you that Portabella is the project management solution for your student career. If so, the time to sign up for a 7 day free trial.

If not, feel free to email support@portabella.io to talk to a real human and we’ll help to iron out any concerns you have.