5 Ways to Increase Your Work From Home Productivity
It's not too late to pick up some new skills
Want to spend less time on your computer during the pandemic and beyond? Here are five productivity tools I use every day along with some tips on how to get the most out of them.
Test Expander
Do you find yourself writing the same sentences over and over again? For example, closing an email with “I’m looking forward to speaking with you soon.” Or starting an email with something like, “It’s great to hear from you.” Or do you write anything where having super quick keyboard shortcuts would help you be more productive?
If so, check out Text Expander. It will literally save you hours each year. I have built hundreds of snippets for myself, such as “;add” for my address, “;em” for my email or “;ttt” for “Thank you very much.” I’ve also added “;sig” to add my personal signature to the bottom of an email instead of my pre-programmed business signature. Text Expander is a paid program, but it’s worth the $3.33 per month they charge.
You can do almost exactly the same thing for free on an iPhone by tapping General > Keyboard > Text Replacement and adding an abbreviation and a phrase to match. Line breaks are tricky, but for single sentences, this is a great productivity booster. Especially if you find yourself texting things in different apps, like, “I’ll be home in 10 minutes.” Or, in my case, my personal email address is pretty long to type with my thumbs, so I have it set up as “Eem” on my phone. Why not “;em” like it is on my computer? Because on my iPhone keyboard, you need to hit the shift key to tap a semicolon. I have zero interest in doing that, so I type “E” because the iPhone automatically capitalizes the first letter of any word you type, and then “em” for email. There are no words in the English language that start with “Eem,” so it’s a safe, super-quick abbreviation.
For Android users, there’s freemium app called Texpand that works great. (Pro Tip: Double letter starts are great for snippets. “ccell” for your cell number or “wweb” for your URL.)
Alfred
Alfred is an app launcher for macOS. It allows you to set a keyboard macro that will open a single input dialog box. You type the first letter of the app you want to launch and Alfred will show you the apps you’ve launched in a list. More than 90% of the time, you just hit enter to launch your app. About 10% of the time you arrow down an app or two. This is a huge time saver. You never have to take your hands off the keyboard to launch an app. No mouse, no icon, just a couple of keystrokes.
For Windows users, you can download Microsoft Power Toys from GitHub. It’s not as powerful as Alfred, but it does have a launcher function that is similar.
Alfred Powerpack
Alfred Powerpack is a paid addition to Alfred. It has all the functions of Text Expander, and among other incredible productivity enhancements, it offers a virtually unlimited clipboard history. Of all the power user tips in the world and of all the little things you can do to level up your computer skills, clipboard history apps are at the very top of the list. Alfred Powerpack has been my secret weapon for years. You can search it for phrases you copied from an article three weeks ago. You can use it to help you remember the syntax of that line of Python code you used last month. You can use it to remember the website coupon code you used yesterday. Clipboard history is simply a must for anyone who wants to get faster and more productive.
