Do you sometimes get in the mood to improve your workflows?
I call this definitely one of my “moods” because it happens to me often. Some days, I find myself watching videos on YouTube or reading new articles about tools people have built that has improved their life in some way.
I recently deep dived in that rabbit hole and now I’m here writing this blog post. 🙈 These tools has helped my productivity as I’ve started to embed them into my workflows. Give them a try!
Bear
I’ve mentioned Bear previously, it is where I write most of my notes and actually where I prefer to write my blog posts in markdown.
Organised nested tags
Bear recently updated the way they do tagging, now with nested tags allowing you to organise your notes better because it can get messy quite quickly.
I love this specifically for blogging where I usually write a few blog posts (or a skeleton of one) at once, so putting them under the “to-post” tag is useful.
Once I’ve done with that, I can move it out of that to-post and into just “blog”. I eventually archive these!
Vanilla
Using command+1 , I can easily toggle between showing these icons on my menu bar. That’s all that Vanilla does, but it’s such a useful tool for folks like me who don’t enjoy having a cluttered screen.
Raycast
Raycast replaced Alfred and Spotlight Search for me. I prefer it because of how it felt specifically built for Engineers who like using the command line.
I also love every single one of the plugins and add-ons you can have, here are some of my favourites. You can browse the full list on their GitHub repo.
Colour Selector
Have you ever wanted to quickly get the HEX code of a colour you’ve seen? This allows you to do that very quickly and easily so that you can reference it in your style sheets and wherever else.
GitHub
This is an in-built integration that allows you to search through GitHub repos quickly. As someone who regularly looks at the Gitpod repo for instance, this saves me time going through the manual steps of opening a new tab in my browser.
Quicklinks
Another super useful tool! This allows you to type in links to quickly navigate from Search rather than going through the more manual approach.
Window Management
I’ve had other tools that manage my windows for me such as Rectangle. But I like how Raycast can do this built-in. I prefer it when I find one tool that does it all rather than installing multiple tools!
Rocket
Want to level up your emoji game? Get Rocket 🚀 This was actually recommended to me by someone on Twitter (another reason why I love Twitter!) I’ve gotten used to typing emojis as I do on Slack, so having a tool that does this for you across applications was like finding gold… especially as a serial emoji expressionist 🤩
Emoji heaven
Snippets
You can also have snippets. I have some things I say frequently when interacting with folks on Twitter or socials that I regularly share, so this snippet is super useful!
GIFs/Images
I have levelled up my GIF/images game with Rocket. Look at all my favourite Brooklyn 99 GIFs 😂 What can I say? I express myself quite a bit!
Chrome Profiles
Someone pointed this out to me recently, you can have different profiles on Chrome! I like separating my work Google accounts and personal Google accounts, this is a great way to do it.
With each one, I also have a browser theme to remind me which one I’m using. Purple for personal and Orange for work. 👌🏻
Alt-Tab
This is another tool that was only introduced to me recently. AND, I actually hadn’t realised that you can tab to other windows like that on the Mac, so I wasn’t even using the native Apple tool properly. 😂
(P.S. also realised that with an iPad and keyboard, you can do the same thing… I wish I knew this sooner!)
Alt-Tab is nicer because you can see each window rather than just the icon of each program. I no longer click through different windows, but just Alt-Tab ‘em. It’s a tiny time-saver but makes a world of difference.
Your turn – tell me your favourite tools/workflows
Comment them below or send me a tweet!
Discovering new tools and workflows is always a lot of fun for me. Exploring what is out there improving lives (in a productivity sense) is an adventure that leads me to hours of tinkering. I.e. just another day in my life 😆
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