- I have a central tenant
that I follow for any kind of work that I'm doing.
And it's this.
If I find myself doing something repeatedly,
there is a process I have to follow all the time
over and over again,
then anything I can do to make that process more efficient
either by making it faster,
removing steps or automating steps, I should do.
And with that idea in mind that today,
I would like to share with you
my top 10 favorite productivity apps,
specifically for Windows.
Now I've got a couple of friends
who have done these kind of app roundup lists for the Mac.
And I do use Mac OS.
I use a lot of those apps,
but I actually use Windows more often.
I prefer on the desktop platforms
and I haven't seen a whole lot of these videos
for us Windows folk.
So today I'm gonna be breaking down my top 10,
including the one that I think is
probably gonna be the most interesting for you.
My surprise pick, one that you're probably not
expecting, a pair that work insanely well together.
They're the ones that I'm most excited to share
with you in this video.
And finally, the one that is objectively
the most useful app on this list.
One other great thing about this list is
that every app on it is actually free.
So let's get into this list,
starting with the one that I think
you might find most interesting
which is an app called Sharex.
Sharex is a screenshot tool for Windows.
It's free, it's open source.
And I use the heck out of it
because I take a ton of screenshots in my work
and I do this for multiple different purposes.
I do it for content creation.
If you've seen any of my written
Notion tutorial over on my website
you've probably seen my screenshots and animated GIFs
but I also use it to communicate more efficiently
with my team.
For instance, the other day
my personal website had a bug on it
and I was able to just take screenshots
of the bug and send them in Slack to my developer, Martin,
to show him exactly what was going on.
It's a lot more efficient than trying to type
up a long description, but Sharex has a trick up
its sleeve that a lot of other screenshot apps do not have
which is optical character recognition.
You can actually take a screenshot
of some text within a picture or YouTube video
and it will pull that text
out and put it right on your clipboard.
So you can then paste it into your note taking application.
Now I should mention that there is a builtin screenshot tool
within Windows called Snip and Sketch
and it's honestly very capable.
You can use it
by hitting Windows, Key, shift S.
You can take screenshots
put 'em on your clipboard, draw on them.
But the editor that comes
within Sharex is just vastly more powerful
and lets you do things like adding boxes, drawing arrows
adding pixelation and blurring for sensitive info.
It's just overall a lot better.
And that's why I personally like using it
over Snip and Sketch.
Now there are a couple of little tweaks
that I add to share X to make it a little bit better.
First I add multiple hot keys for different jobs.
So I like to use control shift F to add a screenshot
directly to my clipboard
or control shift C to open up the editor
so I can make boxes or arrows or what have you.
And then I use control shift alt C
if I want to use the optical character recognition
and pull text out of an image.
And I also configure my default screenshots
to live inside of Google drive.
So all my screenshots are available
to me across all my different devices.
App number two on this list is called Quick Look.
And if you've ever used Mac OS you probably
know there is a function built
into the operating system called Quick Look
which is sadly absent on Windows.
Well, this app brings it in there.
Now in Mac OS
Quick Look is a function in finder
where you can basically click
on a file without opening it
and see information about that file in the sidebar.
You can see an image preview,
if it's an image, you can see text inside of a text file.
And the Quick Look app inside
the Microsoft Windows store adds this to Windows.
You can click on a file and without opening it
you can just hit the space bar to preview it.
Now, this is less useful for really simple file types
like images or text because notepad
and the Windows photo viewer open pretty quickly
but this also works on Photoshop files.
So I can preview Photoshop files
in a very big window without open up Photoshop.
I can open up animated GIFs or videos
and preview them without launching a dedicated app for it.
So overall really useful tool.
And I love that it has a button that'll let me
make the preview stay on top of other windows,
as I sometimes want to say, take a screenshot
and make sure it floats on top of something else,
just so I can reference it.
App number three on this list
and you probably saw this coming, is Notion.
I can't make this list complete
without Notion because I use it every single day.
And there is in fact desktop app.
So I can use it directly on Windows
which means I'm not breaking the rules of this list.
Now I do have a confession to make,
which is that I think that Mac OS has a greater number
of top tier note-taking applications than Windows does.
It has Ulysses, it has Bear
and has Apple Notes, which is frankly fantastic.
But at this point, notion has made enough improvements both
in its speed and in fixing some
of the annoyances I used to have with it
that it is now my favorite note taking application,
in particular, just recently,
they fixed the bug where you couldn't select text precisely
across blocks, which was actually kind of a bug
in pretty much all based text editors.
I think Whimsical was the first one to really fix it
at least that I noticed, but now Notion has done as well
which means that I can select text
like I could in a regular word processor like Google docs.
And that means I can write
and I can edit precisely inside of Notion
and Notion runs a lot more than just my note taking.
In fact, I run my entire content
creation process inside of Notion.
We capture ideas there, we run the entire content pipeline
in there from research, to scripting to editing.
And we even have a library of all of our past videos
so we can pull information from them when we need it.
That system is called Creators Companion.
I've actually turned it into a template
and you can check it out over@thomasjfrank.com/cc.
And for personal productivity,
I like to manage my tasks in notion.
I have a full template for that.
I do my note taking in Notion,
but what I've really wanted ever
since I discovered this app is a full
on second brain template.
Something would marry tasks and projects and notes
and goals and have them all work in harmony.
I've been kicking around with this design
in my head for a very long time.
It's very tough to get right
to get the UX to be easily usable,
so it won't turn into a mess later on
but I think I'm just about done designing this template.
And I've got a second channel called Thomas Frank explains.
It's all about Notion build guides and tutorials.
So if you are interested
in that kind of thing, check that channel out.
I'll have it link the description down below
and let's move on to our fourth app in this list
which actually takes our award
for the most surprising app on the list.
And it's actually Microsoft Edge.
The browser that comes built into Windows.
Yes, I have had Microsoft popping up little things
telling me to switch over from Chrome to edge for years now
but I've always ignored it until I looked
up some stats and found out
that Edge is actually a faster browser than Chrome.
And I was getting kind of tired of Chrome
just hogging up tons of resources on my system.
So I decided to give Edge a try.
And what do you know?
It's actually kind of great.
At this point, it's built on top of Chromium
which is the engine that Chrome is built on.
So it's very familiar.
All the keyboard shortcuts are the same and crucially
you can install extensions
from the Chrome Web store into Edge.
Pretty much any extension that works inside
of Chrome now works in Edge,
which means that I'm not losing anything
by making the switch.
And I'm gaining quite a few things.
Number one, Edge does feel snappier and it feels
like it takes up less resources than Chrome does.
There's even a built in feature that will put tabs to sleep
after two hours by default, if you're not using them
which frees up system resources even more.
But maybe my favorite feature on Edge
is if you go up to your tab bar and right click
you can turn on vertical tabs,
which will move your tabs from being a horizontal list
across the top of the bar to a vertical list on the side,
which means that even if you are a tab hoarder like I am,
you can still see the names
of all your tabs, which you cannot do in Chrome
without a third party extension.
App number five on the list
is actually one that is built
right into Windows and it's the Windows Clipboard Manager.
So if you've ever used a clipboard before
if you've ever copied and pasted
you probably know that the clipboard is one
of the most useful functions in any operating system.
But by default, it has one major limitation.
It only remembers the last thing you copied.
It's a lot more useful
if you have clipboard history turned on
so you can see everything you've copied
and you can go back and paste something old.
And that is exactly what the clipboard history feature does.
So if you wanna turn it on
all you gotta do is hit Windows key V.
It will ask you if you wanna turn it on,
and then you can even sync your clipboard history
across devices, if you want to.
I don't do that because I put passwords on my
clipboard and I don't really like the idea
of having it transmitted across anything
that isn't into my Password Manager
but it is an option if you want to use it.
And that brings us to one
of two apps that I am personally most excited to share
with you in this video.
These two apps work really well as a pair.
So that first app is called Flow Launcher.
And all Flow Launcher does is bring up a small text window
on your computer when you hit a key command
by default alt space.
But once it's there, you can type commands
to do pretty much anything on your computer
quite a bit faster than you would by doing it normally.
Again, we're going back to that concept
of taking repeat processes and making them more efficient.
So with Flow Launcher, I can launch websites.
I can do Google searches.
I can bring up files or directories on my computer.
I can even do calculations quite a bit faster
than I would with the stock calculator app.
And I can even control Spotify.
I can type SP in the name
of a playlist or a song and I can start playing it.
I can turn on shuffle.
I can do all kinds of cool stuff.
I absolutely love Flow Launcher.
And you can customize the heck out of it to just bring
up this little thing and do stuff quite a bit faster.
And I'm just gonna roll right
into the seventh app of the list
which is called Espanso.
And Espanso is a text expander app
which you'll find very useful
if you often find yourself typing the same long strings
of text, like your email address or common URLs
or if you do customer support or something,
the same exact response to customers.
You can define these very short key snippets
that when you type they automatically expand
into that longer snippet of text.
So for instance
I can type EMT to auto expand my email address.
I can type PWF to auto expand my Notion fundamentals URL
which I'm constantly pasting inside of comments.
I can even expand really
really long strings of text as well.
And I personally love Espanso more than then say
Auto Hot Key, which I used to use for this purpose
because Espanso also comes
with a search bar that you can bring
up very similar to Flow Launchers,
but you can search your snippets
and then automatically paste them without having
to type the entire thing, which is really, really nice.
And I'm putting Flow Launcher and Espanso together
because in my workflow, they work very well in tandem.
Personally, I have to bring
up a lot of different directories on my computer very often.
I've got one for video thumbnails.
I've got one for current projects being edited.
I've got one for my second channel.
So I've defined little key snippets in Espanso
that I can type into Flow Launcher to automatically
launch those directories way quicker
than I would get to them if I was navigating normally
and to continue my complaints
about Windows Explorer, we're gonna move on
to app number eight, which is called Everything.
And Everything is a simple utility that lets you
search your files and folders
and Windows because Windows's folder search
and file search is famously slow.
It takes forever.
And for whatever reason, everything indexes your hard drive
and lets you search pretty much instantly.
Now there was also an Everything plugin for Flow Launcher.
So you can actually use Flow Launcher
to search your computer pretty well,
but sometimes you're looking for a file
and you wanna be able to browse a lot more
on your screen than Flow Launcher will show you.
So I also recommend having everything installed
by default so you can use it when you need it.
App number nine on this list is good old Google Drive.
I don't think this list would be complete without
an app that gets files off
of your computer and syncs them to another destination,
so they're backed up
and also available on other devices as well.
Google Drive, I think is the best option still
even though there is also a Dropbox
and OneDrive and other options because for free,
they give you the most storage space.
They give you 15 gigs
versus OneDrive's five and Dropbox is paltry two.
And my tip for using Google Drive efficiently
is to ignore the documents, pictures, music
all those different directories on your computer
and instead create a sort
of root file system within your Google Drive folder.
That way you're gonna have a single place that you know
to go to, to start looking for files,
if you're not choosing to search for them
using say Everything.
And that brings us to our final app on this list
which is probably objectively the most useful app
out of any that I've covered here.
And that is F.lux or maybe F.lux
if you wanna pronounce it that way.
This is a very small tiny utility that does one thing
as it gets closer to dark,
to your bedtime, it dims your screen and it makes it warmer.
And the reason it does this is that light,
be it artificial light
or sunlight messes with our circadian rhythms.
There's a little part of your brand called
the suprachiasmatic nucleus that is connected to your
eyes and when your eyes intake light waves
it essentially adjusts your circadian rhythm
and it can make it harder to fall asleep
or to get quality sleep,
if you're exposed to artificial light late at night.
And as it turns out, blue light affects this more
than other types of visible light.
So the idea behind F.lux and the idea
behind those blue blocker glasses you probably heard
about is it gets rid of some
of that blue light and possibly makes it easier
for you to fall asleep or to have better quality sleep.
So if you find yourself on the computer late
at night or on your phone late at night,
using something like F.lux
may actually help you sleep better.
And as we've talked about in many different videos
sleep is one of the three pillars of health
with the other two being your nutrition
and your exercise,
that really form the foundation
of your ability to get things done.
So all these other tools we've talked
about are kind of just, you know, extra icing
on the cake.
F.lux may actually help you live a more
healthy life and hence a more productive one.
Now, earlier I talked
about how Notion was my constant companion
for my video production process.
One of my most essential tools
for getting these videos done and done more efficiently.
Let me share one additional resource that really helps
with my video production process as well.
And that is Story Blocks, who have kindly
sponsored this video.
If you are a creator, if you make videos like I do
you definitely want to check out Story Blocks
because they give you access to a library
of more than 1 million creative assets
that you get unlimited access to use inside your content.
That includes a B roll and stock footage.
It includes sound effects and music.
So you can level up your sound design.
It includes After Effects templates, motion graphics
templates, tons of stuff that can level up your content.
And to give you a bit
of an insight to our actual video production process
we cut down this talking head footage
to what we call an A roll cut.
At that point, my team and I come up with B roll ideas
to go on top of that A roll
and we do shoot some of that B or selves
but often there are shots that we just can't get on our own.
And Story Blocks allows us to get a lot of that
which allows us to make our content a lot more engaging.
And another great thing about Story Blocks
is that they are extremely affordable.
Normally if you wanna license stock footage
a lot of sites wanna charge you hundreds
of dollars per clip, seriously, but with Story Blocks
you have one low subscription that gets you unlimited access
to as many assets as you want.
And they have plans to fit pretty much any budget
whether you're a solo creator or running a large team.
So if you wanna start leveling up your content
and get started, go over to storyblocks.com/thomas
to sign up or go to the link right there on screen.
If you do choose to use Story Blocks, thank you so much
for supporting my sponsors.
This is a great to support this channel as well.
Hopefully you enjoyed this.
If you found something useful,
maybe a brand new tool
that's gonna help your workflow
hit that like button for the algorithm.
And if you're looking for something else to watch
I've got a great companion video for this one
on the best browser extensions for productivity
or if you are a Notion user, I just made a brand new video
on 10 things you might be doing wrong
in your Notion workspace.
check those out and I'll see yet in the next one.