The computer is a workshop. It’s not just one tool. It’s an accumulation of tools. You should set up a workshop in an organized fashion and in a way that you can navigate through seamlessly.
The following tools help me to save time and mental capacity.
The computer should serve you. And the following tools help me to make my time spend on the computer more effective.
I share this article with you because I think these apps are precious. This article is not an advertisement for any of these apps. I don’t get any money for writing about these programs. Links are NOT affiliated links. I share it because I think it can improve the life of the reader.
Once your workshop is set up well, you shall not spend much time anymore searching for better tools. Don’t waste your time organizing yourself better and better but then not getting the actual work done. Make sure you manage well, and then do what you want to do.
I use a Mac. I am sure there are equivalent windows versions.
This app is arranging your windows on the screen. The important factor is using the keyboard for quick arrangement.
I mostly use the hot-keys to put windows into the left, right, top, bottom, and corners or maximize them.
In this app, you can easily organize snippets that automatically get pasted when you type predefined abbreviations.
For example, whenever I need to put my address somewhere, I type “adr“ and press space, and my address is pasted there.
I think I currently use around 500 snippets. I don’t know how much time this program has already saved me, but it must be a considerable amount in the last years. At the moment of writing this, it has pasted text snippets for me around 30.000 times.
Thanks to Sascha Fast for introducing me to this program. It changed my life.
Alternative: TextExpander
This program is storing things that you copy. So that if you copy something, the items you copied before are not lost (the usual copy & paste problem). The app creates a list of items you have copied.
This makes more extensive copy-paste actions just so much more effective.
It’s a mystery why this is not a built-in program in macOS. The amount of time and frustration it saves you is tremendous.
This has far from the best translations, but it sits in the status bar, and I can open it with a hot-key (I use CMD+y), type in the word that I want to translate quickly, and get a result.
Good in Zoom conferences where I need a quick word or quick translations when I read a text.
This app does one simple thing:
If you have an appointment in your calendar, it blocks the whole screen for a moment to tell you that you have an appointment. You can predefine how long before the meeting it should notify you.
I sometimes work with such a focus that I lose track of time completely. Because of this, I have missed some appointments in the past.
So this little app allows me to stay in my deep focus and not worry about missing an appointment because it will prominently tell me.
This little app makes sure your Mac stays on and doesn’t go into all sorts of energy-saving modes.
This program is essential for my YouTube uploads. Before, I had the problem that if I uploaded huge files and left the computer alone, I could not be sure that the file got uploaded because the computer might go into an energy-saving mode and not continue to upload. So this program makes sure the computer stays on. You can define the time it should stay on, and that’s it.
This program will probably not be necessary for most people, but I use it all the time.
Joseph Bartz
01.09.2021