Every “best apps” list I read feels like it was written by someone who’s never had to actually get work done. So I wanted to ask you all, the people who actually use these things daily.
Here’s what’s worked for me over the past year:
Notion — I resisted for a long time because I was an Asana fan. But Notion pairs project management with documentation, and nothing else comes close. We’re on the paid version, but the free tier is generous.
Todoist — Simple, fast, works everywhere. I tried Reminders, Things, TickTick… kept coming back to this.
Clockify — Free time tracking that doesn’t feel like surveillance. Helpful when I’m trying to figure out where my week went.
Rectangle (Mac) — Window management. I’m a person of too many tabs and waaay too many windows. I went from “What is Rectangle?” to using it constantly.
Bitwarden — My personal password manager. Open source, free, works across everything. Now I actually have secure passwords
There are a few paid apps I’d have a hard time giving up (TextExpander being one, obviously), but I’m curious what free tools people swear by.
What’s something free that’s become part of your daily workflow?
My big one this year is Claude and all of its various MCPs that give me a single interface to all these different services and also let me cross reference them.
I’ve been using CopyClip for years. I set it to keep the most recent 9999 clipboard contents. But this past year it has gone wonky in that it lists the latest clip over and over several times. I think it must be a conflict between it and several other apps and maybe even TextExpander, but it’s still very useful, just more cluttered.
I also habe CopyClip2, which I never really liked the contents only show a page of 10 at a time so scrolling for previous clips gets annoying, but you can keep favorites pinned to the top of list. Now those are more and more replaced by snippets.
**TextSnipper.**app is used many times per day. It captures any text. Particularly invaluable when text cannot be highlighted and copied, or to capture text in an image or video. Try Free License for 1 Mac - $7.99
License for 3 Macs - $9.99
Unlimited License - $11.99
OR part od Setapp
Popclip is also invaluable. When you highlight text it popsup a menu that you can populate with any number of over 200 extensions (icons). The first reason I got it, if you ever tped a sentence leaving caps-lock on, instead of having to delete and retype, highlight the sentence and click on the “lowercase” icon or even better, the “sentence case” icon. Also avail is the “Title case” icon. I also used the timestamp icon very much for inserting dates in my preferred format eg. 2026-02-11, but not so much now that function done by TextExpander. The “+” icon glues multiple “copy” clips together. Word counter, character counter, Highlight an URL and click “open link” opens that URL in browser. Highlight a list of text items, click on “sort” icon. Highlight a prompt click on “ChatGPT” icon… Hundreds more
For Mac only. It works free forever but over time popup reminder to purchase gets annoying. 2 years for $12, forever $26.
For my old eyes, i use ZoomMe often. It’s a magnifying glass. Or back in Popclip if the tiny text is higjlightable, hit the “Large Type” icon and the entire screen goes black with the highlightes text vexpands to very readable size.
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