Productivity Hacks — Part V (Speed enhancing Productivity Tools)

Content

Part I - Gmail & Slack

Part II - Phone & Trello

Part III - Google Sheets > Excel

Part IV - Quality enhancing Productivity Tools

Part V - Speed enhancing Productivity Tools

• SizeUp
• Monosnap
• Franz
• Email address hack
• Power Tools

1) SizeUp

My pet peeve: people owning massive, super expensive monitors, but only working on a fraction of the screen (windows not sized to the full available size)

Get a size up app and maximise your and your screen's full potential.

My favourite is SizeUp - $13 one-off and I've never regretted it.

There are probably some free apps out there and Windows does it out of the box (windows key + arrow keys).

Set up your shortcuts and resize your windows just as fast as you copy / paste.

It's a game changer, especially if you work on two screens.

2) Monosnap

Monosnap lets you take a screenshot and instantly mark it up <--- free!!

Two reasons to get Monosnap:

1. Save your desktop - Mac spams your desktop or another folder with snapshots - Monosnap either doesn't store it or uploads into into the Cloud
2. Mark up - Super easy, instantaneous any shape and colour and then just copy/paste

3) Franz

• Do you have Facebook? of course you have FB
• Do you have Whatsapp? stupid question of course you do
• Slack? probably not just one - but 5 channels - right?
• Telegram, WeChat, Gmail, LinkedIn or maybe even ICQ?

Well - Franz takes all of them and puts them into one app - so you don't have to have a billion browsers open at the same time - keep them all together.

It's still a little bit buggy - but frees up the clogged browser and mind.

Oh yeah --> it's also free!!

4) Email Address Hack

Did you know - that if you write me an email at:

• michibatko+newsletter@gmail.com
• michbatko@gmail.com

they both hit my inbox?

Why is this useful?

1) Free trials - many websites don't recognise that it's the same email address and you can sign up for free trials as often as you want to

2) Inbox filters - you can use any email address appendix and set up gmail filters that apply to them - ie. all my newsletters go into one folder with an orange label

5) Power Tools

Power Tools is my favourite Google Sheets add-on. It costs a bit extra, but it let's you manipulate data on steroids.

A couple of things it does:

• Capitalisation of words and sentences (Capitalise Each Word, lowercase, UPPPERCASE, tOOgGLE tExT)
• Polish text (remove extra spaces, add space after punctuation)
• Formulas by colours
• Convert text to dates and the other way
• De-dupe
• Randomise datasets

Lots and lots of things which normal excel can't do - but you every know and again would love to have to save you lots of time.

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This is the 5th part of a five part series - but do let me know what you thought and what else you'd be interested in!