What are tools you’ve found helpful to increase your business productivity? Whether it’s AI tools, todo apps, note-taking apps, or anything else, we’d love to hear about it.
Here are my main tools I use daily:
Ahrefs: I use this for tracking organic traffic to the website and researching search keywords for new content.
Gemini: I was (and still am) a big ChatGPT fan, but I’ve started to do a lot of research with Gemini’s enterprise tier. I like how its research mode can create detailed reports, complete with sources so I can verify the output myself.
Notion: We use Notion not only for note-taking, but also for our editorial calendar and meeting notes. I also tend to draft short pieces of content directly in our editorial calendar. It’s a powerful and flexible system that’s as close to an all-in-one writing tool as you can get.
Screen Studio: Whenever I have to record product demos, Screen Studio is my go-to. Its killer feature is the capability to zoom in during the video, which makes small UI elements visible.
TextExpander: Of course, I use TextExpander heavily in my daily work. Specifically, it’s useful for long names (like TextExpander), daily status update templates, stock messages to coworkers, and useful LLM prompts.
Microsoft ‘New’ Outlook for Mac. A boring start, I know. I must say that it’s been fast, and rock-solid, even though it doesn’t always find what I’m looking for (for those items, I’ll use Apple Mail).
Evernote. I’ve been using Evernote since 2009, and while I’ve had some issues with it, it has been serving me well.
Spark. For all of the emails that are not work-related. The integrations are huge for me.
Task Manager. I keep bouncing back and forth between Things and OmniFocus. Right now, it’s OmniFocus… but I’m sure I’ll flip flop back and forth until the heat death of the universe.
TextExpander. I am unsure what got me using it back in the day (I have a receipt from way back when), but I use it all the time. Nothing can replace it’s utility on all of my devices (Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Windows).
DEVONthink: Resource storage that indexes and shows related documents. Everything gets a URI to link to that works on macos, ios, and ipad os.
Keyboard Maestro: Use macros for workflow hotkeys so that one hotkey can call the appropriate action based on the foreground app. Hyper F hotkey will call up Finder for the context of the foreground app. F9 hotkey is my workflow key…if in Apple Mail, then send that mail to DEVONthink…if in DEVONthink create a new task in Emacs Org Mode with that link to act on it…if in Calendar copy the calendar item to a new meeting note template in Emacs Org Mode with the calendar invitees listed in the notes…
Emacs: Org Mode is my task/project manager with integrated notes and time tracking. Task, Meeting, or Project notes exported as PDF to DEVONthink for future reference. This replaced Sublime Text, OmniFocus, iThoughts, Notability, and TimeTrack.io. Jupyter notebooks replaced with using code-cells to navigate and eglot to use Ruff for linting and formatting a version control with Magit. Emacs gptel package allows conversations with LLMs within Emacs.
Snagit: Screen capture that supports panoramic scrolling to capture Teams, Slack, and Messages threads to send to DEVONthink that can OCR that to a searchable PDF. Keyboard Maestro macro kicks this off and stores the link to the Teams or Slack thread as metadata in the PDF stored in DEVONthink. So if I need to reply or open an attachment in that thread, I can hit a hotkey to go from that PDF to the original thread. These PDFs usually end up in Org Mode Projects so I have quick access to the conversations that are related to each project no matter if they came from email, Teams, Slack, or meeting notes.
TextExpander: URLs that I want to use in any browser, email signature for any email client, SQL query templates.
Tools that I use regularly and wish I had them 20 years ago…
Text expander, this is great for the simple jobs like writing ;gm for Good morning. that’s obvious, but it’s so much more powerful than than that. I send a lot of more or less identical emails, I use nested snippets a lot to enable me to write complex emails in a matter of seconds. The more you explore Text Expander the more you get out of it. If you’re using it to just make it quicker to write ‘Good morning’ then you’re missing out.
Evernote, I’ve been using this for many years, saving all of my documents personal and business I now am just short of 8000 notes. ranging from annual accounts to a recipe I quite like and everything in between. invaluable
Lastpass, so I don’t use the same simple password for everything, again invaluable
ChatGPT, I use this a lot throughout the day. It helps me summarise information. Helps me to organise google sheets solutions cutting down on time spent by automating tasks, this is done with very little software knowledge. I just tell it what I want and tell it to explain to me how to do it as if I was 10 years old, it’s a game changer and has helped automate a number of different time consuming tasks for me.
Hazel from Noodlesoft (https://www.noodlesoft.com) -Define rules for your folders to rename, move, sort, etc. files. Great for creating automated workflows. For example, I can drop my credit card invoice into a folder, Hazel checks for it, renames with the right date and year it and sorts it in a corresponding subfolder (Year/month) - even makes the folder if not there yet.
Affinity Designer (https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/) - Not a productivity tool in itself, but a highly professional vector drawing programme that makes drawing high-quality figures extremely quickly (great shortcuts and clever features) and joyful. It saves me a lot of time. Also available on the iPad with clever use of gestures.
Great list! I’m going to have to try out some of these tools.
I switch back and forth between MacOS and Windows frequently and I have an external keyboard that I use with both laptops. One tool that has let me keep my sanity between ctrl vs command and hotkey differences between the two OSes is Karabiner-Elements for Mac.
That tool lets me use the same exact OS shortcut keys regardless of which laptop I happen to be using at the time. Karabiner for all the OS stuff, and TextExpander for all of my content!
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