Think of how often you copy and paste in a day.Īnd think of how often you copy something, only to remember that you just overwrote something you needed.Ī clipboard manager will store your clippings, so that when you paste, you’ll get an inline window with recent things you’ve copied. Pastebot ($9.50)Ĭlipboard managers are the kind of things that you start using and immediately regret not using them before. Also, build it up slowly so that you remember what you automate. Pro tip: Make sure that when you start building up a library, you use some type of convention that you’ll remember. Typing shortcuts can automatically populates current dates instead, ie “fmon” converts to 201901.

Dates: I use 20190114 as a convention for appending file names.

Email intros: Email basics that I use again and again “ ihyaw” corrects to “I hope you are well”.

Bios/Boilerplates: My bio, Freightos’ missions statement and more.

Color palettes: Hex codes of the core Freightos or personal website colors that I use (ie “ blue” corrects to #0093EE).

Frequent links: Freightos links, my MeetingBird meeting schedule link, my Zoom meeting link, and my social platform links.

Addresses: personal or family addresses, as well as company office addresses globally.

Contact details: my emails, phone numbers, and websites.

Some of my favorite text expansion snippets are: “ emf”, on the other hand, will enter my Freightos email. Instead of typing in my personal email address 78 times a day, I type “ emp”, which automatically corrects to my personal email address. To make my life easier, all shortcuts are triggered with a prefix of a “ ”, followed by a memorable shortcut. Links, and templates that I automate to be typed with aText when I enter a keyword. Over the past three years, I’ve built a huge library of emails, addresses, And it’s exactly where text expanders come in. And, like good sheep, we never question if there’s a better way. It’s incredible how often we find ourselves writing the same things again and again and again. This is also something I could never go back on.

Trigger system macros from Keyboard Macro (more on that later).

I use this to for a million things, like adding or removing users from email lists or even logging press hits in a Google Sheet

Connect to Zapier (with which I have a long-standing infatuation).Write your own scripts (I wrote a Python script that lets me put in a name and company name, and then queries Clearbit and Hunter.io for the user’s email).Turn off/on notifications (Do Not Disturb mode).Run quick conversions between unit measurements.Custom searches (I have a predefined search where I enter a company name and it automatically searches in Google Images with transparent colors and the word logo appended).Slack: Find users or channels and send them messages anywhere.The real gold comes in with Powerpack,a paid add-on that lets you customize workflows or download ones that other heroes have built like… And a million other things, including running system commands, use word snippets (ala aText below), open bookmarks, and more.Find correct spelling or definitions of words.Run quick calculations without opening up anything.Find any file, open it, browse folders, or cut and paste, all with inline search.You’ll get the ability to build your own workflows or download a boatload of free ones.

But if you shell out a one-time fee of $30, I mostly use it to locate folders or files, open them, perform quick math calculations, and open URLs. The high-level pitch is that it’s a launcher, where you hit a shortcut key and start typing to instantly open applications, perform calculations, skip Spotify songs, and more.Īccording to its stats, I use it over twenty times a day and I can’t help but feel like that’s low-balling. The Must Have Mac Productivity Apps Alfred (Free, $30 for real value)Īlfred is the most important productivity tool I use on my Mac. Oh, and to make you more productive, here’s the whole list up-front: The Short List Plus, good developers deserve to make money. I value my time and every one of these has paid off…in spades. And one word of warning – many are paid apps. I’ve split them into must-haves, nice-to-haves, and honorable mentions, but they’re all good. Or, sans dramatics, the apps that significantly improve the quality of my life. So after fielding a couple of questions, here are the twenty Mac productivity apps that I can’t live without. Mostly because of the carrot that they they help recover hours of my week. I still remember the aha moment when I learned that F4 toggles between anchoring rows and columns in Excel formulas.Īnd despite I the world’s worst memory, I seem to remember keyboard shortcuts, Note that this was written in 2019 I’ve made some changes since.

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