- Thanks to Hover for sponsoring this video
and supporting my channel.
I talk a lot about productivity apps in this channel,
but for the most part,
the apps that I cover tend to be the more well-known ones,
Notion, Todoist.
So today I want to flip the script a little bit.
Today I'm going to be joined by my friend Ali Abdaal,
who is a doctor, a YouTuber,
and a productivity expert in his own right,
to talk about some of the lesser known productivity apps
that both of us use on a daily basis
to improve our respective workflows.
Here are six productivity apps that you
probably haven't heard of before.
What's up Ali?
- Hey Matt, I'm doing very well, thank you.
How are you?
- Good, doing well as well.
So what I wanted to do today is give people a glimpse
into some of the more maybe obscure
productivity apps that we use.
Maybe like little utilities,
things that just help us get things done
a little bit better, go that extra 10%.
So I brought three and you brought three as well, right?
- Absolutely.
The first one I want to mention isn't really an app.
It's something that's built into every Apple device.
So iOS, iPad OS, Mac OS.
And it's something that a lot of people don't know about
and that is keyboard replacement.
So if you go on your system preferences on your Mac
and you hit keyboard,
then under this text thing
what you can actually do is create these like little
keyboard replacement-y thingies for whatever you want.
So often I'll get a question from people being like,
hey, how do you study for exams?
And if I type in exclamation mark A-R
across any of my devices, so iPhone, iPad, Mac,
it will replace it with how to study for exams,
evidence-based revision tips,
and a link to my YouTube video.
If I type in exclamation desk set up across any device,
it will say my productivity desk set up 2019 or 2020 or,
and the link to the video.
Basically any important thing that
I find myself typing out more than once
I will turn into one of these keyboard replacement thingys
and it will just be synced across all my devices
and I think that's completely magical
and I think more people should do this.
In fact, if I show you my iPhone screen,
so I'm on my iPhone,
I'm going to go into settings
and it's got text replacement
and you'll see it's got all of the same ones
and it's synced across my Mac and across my iPhone so.
- Okay so the first step that I'm gonna share
is not actually a Windows specific app,
it's a Chrome extension.
So I don't know about you,
but I am absolutely terrible with tabs.
I'll just have like a million tabs open
and then I go like to shut my computer down
at the end of the night,
but I want a lot of these tabs.
Like, I want to know what they were at least.
So there's a little extension called tap copy,
and you can just click this little button here
and copy the URLs to all of your open tabs
and you can choose to have,
like expanded word will have the the title
and the meta-description,
compact is just the title or just the link.
So I'll copy all the tabs
and then I can just open up Notion
and I can go to my little dashboard
or my note taking system.
I'm just going to put them in my little daily tasks
scratch pad here, but just boom.
Every URL that I had open is now here.
- Wow.
- So I can finally close down my browser
at the end of the night, but not lose anything
because I know it's been tracked here in Notion.
- Have you ever needed to use this to resurface old tabs?
- Absolutely.
- Or is it more like a security blanket?
- Absolutely.
I use it all the time.
Actually I'll show you for the course that I'm building.
These are all of the links that I have
saved from my browser.
Just for like plugins for shopping carts
or CloudFlare optimizations or all kinds of stuff.
Like this is a project that's ongoing,
so I'll work on it a little bit every day,
but I don't want to lose this stuff
before I'm done using it.
As long as I have the URLs, I'm good to go.
- All right.
Next, we have an amazing Mac app
and this is one of the most powerful things about a Mac,
which is unfortunately not quite
built into the operating system.
And this is an app called Alfred.
And the cool thing about Alfred is you press
command and space
and then it brings up this box
that essentially lets you type anything.
The Windows equivalent is it's sort of like
hitting the Windows logo key
and on Mac sort of like using spotlight search,
but Alfred is just a lot more powerful
than the default built-in options.
So there's lots of things you can do with Alfred.
But the simple one is you can use it
to open any kind of app.
So let's say I wanna open Chrome.
I would hit command space bar
and I would just type in "chr" and I'd hit enter
and Chrome will open.
My whole philosophy around this,
and I'm sure you feel the same way,
is that when it comes to productivity,
like it's, you know, on a macro level,
it's important to do the right things
and then do those things right.
But then on a very micro level,
if you can just shave off milliseconds
of any interaction that you have with a computer,
that is really going to add up over the long term.
And so normally if I wanna open Chrome,
it would take me at least two seconds to go all the way
across my ultra wide monitor and click on it.
- Yep.
- Whereas with Alfred,
it's sort of done in less than a half a second.
- And there's like a lot more you can do with Alford, right?
Like it's not just launching apps.
You can actually do a Google search
or open a website pretty instantly.
- Yeah.
And that's what I,
that's what I like about it compared to
just usual Mac spotlight.
Mac spotlight lets you open apps, it's reasonable,
but let's say I want to search something on Google.
I can just type in whatever I want and hit enter
and it will just automatically realize
that I'm trying to search Google.
If I want to search Amazon,
I type in "ama" tab
and then I can search Amazon for whatever.
So it's kind of like my home base
for anything I want to do in the computer.
If I want to open a file,
I press space bar and then I can open any kind of file.
So if I know what, like a title for a video is called,
I can just type it in and then it'll,
I can open it in downloads
or I can open the file directly or whatever.
The other really cool thing is that it's got these custom
workflows that you can put into Alfred.
- Do you have any?
- Yeah, so the one I use is an integration with Fantastical.
- Okay.
- So Fantastical is my calendar app
and you can just type in "cal."
So meeting tomorrow at 2:00 PM in Oxford
and it will natural language processing that
and automatically say, see, it's added the location,
it's added meeting, it's added the time.
- That's awesome.
- And so this makes it super easy to input calendar events
as soon as like, you know, I find out about them.
The other really cool thing about Alfred
is the clipboard saving.
I don't know if you use this.
- Yes, I use the crap out of the clipboard saver.
- Yeah.
It's so helpful because like how many times
have you sort of copied something
and then overwritten it by copying something else?
But this gives you unlimited basically keyboard history.
- Yeah.
- It's quite handy.
- So the app that I want to talk about
is actually one that is not exclusive to Windows.
It is on both Mac OS and Windows.
So anybody using it or anybody on any OS can use it.
It's called Loom.
So I take a lot of screenshots
and a lot of screen casts
to essentially document what I'm doing,
but Loom lets you quickly record your screen
and then instantly gives you a link
you can copy and paste to share with somebody.
So I use the crap out of this
because it has a Notion integration.
So we have a knowledge base in our Notion workspace
and anytime I want to document a process really quickly
for somebody on my team, I can create a page for it
and then I will just do whatever I need to do
in a Loom recording and once I'm done,
it immediately copies the URL to my clipboard
and I can paste it right here into a Notion page.
- Yeah, that's really helpful.
I should do this a lot more for a team documentation
because I don't document anything right now
and I know it's really bad
and every time I do something, I think, oh,
I wish I'd recorded to Loom right now, but.
- Yeah, yeah, it's pretty helpful.
- All right, so the final app I want to talk about
is a podcast app,
which is unfortunately available for iOS only,
sorry Android heathens out there,
and that is called Airr, A-I-R-R.
Now Airr is amazing because Airr is a podcast app
that lets you save the best moments from podcasts
and they call them Airr quotes.
So the idea is that let's say you're listening to an episode
of "The Knowledge Project" where Derek Sivers
is being interviewed.
So obviously I'm listening to this at 2x speed
and anytime I come across something where I think, oh,
this is a really interesting sort of insight
or an interesting viewpoint,
I can hit the Airr quote button
and it will save the last 30 seconds of what I just heard
and for most of these kind of big podcasts,
they've got transcripts available for them.
So it will automatically transcribe
and figure out what Derek was saying
and therefore I've got a written record
of the bits from the podcast that I want to save.
And so right now I can title it.
So Derek thoughts on happiness
or whatever it was that he's talking about, I hit done.
And now whenever I want,
I can look at my Airr quotes
and I can see this library of quotes
that I've saved from various different podcasts.
So you can see I'm a big fan of the Tim Ferriss Show
and I've got tons and tons of quotes saved
from Naval Ravikant,
another one from Esther Perel,
loads from Seth Godin,
loads from Derek Sivers.
The other really cool thing about this
is that this actually integrates
with another app called Readwise,
which is what I use to help resurface my highlights
from Kindle and from Instapaper and from Twitter.
But the really cool thing is that Readwise
has an integration with Notion
where anytime I make any Kindle highlights,
so I've got 116 of those,
it will automatically import into this
really nice libraries thing in Notion
where I can see all my books.
- So all your highlights, they go into the correct book row?
- Absolutely.
So let's see, let's "Perennial Seller" by Ryan Holiday.
And here are highlights that I made like a few days ago.
- That is cool.
- While I was reading the book.
It's really awesome and more relevant to us,
it also works for podcasts.
So here is this episode of the Tim Ferriss Show
with Seth Godin
and these are all of the times where I pressed
the Airr quote button while listening to this episode.
And now if I want to revisit the stuff,
whether I'm making a video or an email newsletter
or even just to revisit stuff that
I found meaningful in the past,
I can read the transcript and it will give me a timestamp
which will take me to the Airr quote where I can listen.
- Okay, so for my last one,
we're gonna go a little bit back to a concept
you had talked about at the beginning of this video,
which was the whole text snippet replacement.
On Windows, there are many apps that can do this,
but the one that I use is called AutoHotkey.
And essentially you can write out scripts
that will let you define keyboard shortcuts,
do almost anything
and I honestly have only just barely scratched the surface.
So I've got a demo script here
and all of these are little scripts
that will do specific things.
So these are some of my keyboard snippets here.
I've anonymized some of the addresses,
but if I'm filling out a form
or if I'm maybe talking to somebody in Slack,
I can just put like H-A-D-R, hit space,
and it will automatically expand
to have that address in there
or if I'm going through
and like one of these is affiliate commissions,
I have to type this a million times
every time I'm doing my bookkeeping in zero
so I can just put A-C one space, affiliate commissions.
And that is probably the simplest thing you can do.
This one's fun.
So these are some clipboard replacement scripts.
So like I said earlier with Notion,
if I want to share a link to a Notion page,
if I click this and I copy the link
and I wanna share it in Slack,
by default it's gonna be this HTTPS version.
If I click that,
it opens in my browser where I don't want it.
I can edit this to have the Notion slash slash thing,
but it's on my clipboard.
So if I just hit control alt V,
which is the keyboard shortcut
I have defined here with these symbols.
So this means control, this means alt, and then V,
then it's automatically that Notion version link
and it will open up in my desktop app.
And then the last thing that I've done here
is I want a way to very quickly open folders
that I use all the time.
So this is like my main YouTube folder.
This is the Google Drive folder with all of the thumbnails
so I can access it if I'm traveling.
And these are just opening instantly
when I'm hitting a hot key.
So what I've done is defined a series of keyboard shortcuts.
So this is control alt shift four
that opens a specific file path,
but I don't want to hit control alt shift four,
because it's a really weird, awkward hand position.
So I've got a Corsair K95 keyboard
and that comes with this Corsair software
and I have multiple profiles on here.
So this one is called every day
and I've got actions defined.
So these are just macros of me hitting this short code
or this key, so control shift alt seven,
for example, is recorded here
and then it's just bound to one of these G keys on the side.
Well, thanks for joining me Ali.
If people wanna find you, where should they go?
- Thank you very much for having me.
My YouTube channel will be linked
in the video description, I'm sure.
And yeah, you can check out my stuff there.
Thanks for having me.
It's a real honor.
- Absolutely.
Now before we wrap this video up,
I want to clue you in on a couple more resources
that you might not know about
if you tend to watch Ali and myself
here on YouTube exclusively,
which are our respective websites.
Both Ali and I have personal websites
where we create content
and also let the world know about ourselves.
And I don't know about Ali,
but personally I view my personal website
as my online home base.
My biggest audience exists here on YouTube, yes,
but at any time YouTube could go away
or it could change in a way that I don't like
or that's disadvantageous to me.
And with my personal website,
that's not really a threat
because it's a platform that I control 100%.
I can do whatever I want with it
and I can make it the sort of home base
for all my online operations
and for that reason and for other reasons as well,
I think it's a great idea to start thinking about
building a personal website for yourself
if you haven't done so already.
And of course the first step to getting started
along this path is to get yourself
a domain name such as mine, which is thomasjfrank.com.
I was born a little bit too late to snag thomasfrank.com,
but I was at least able to get the one
with my middle initial.
But that's the thing about domain names.
Once somebody grabs it, if they don't let it expire,
that's kind of taken and you can't get it
which is why you want to get your domain name
as quickly as possible.
Even if you're not ready to start building that website,
get that domain name locked down
and go over to Hover to do it.
Hover is the best place on the internet
to get your hands on a domain name,
not least of which because they have
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I have timed myself on this before when I bought thomas.lol
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And that's because Hover also has
over 400 domain extensions.
You've got your classic .com, .me,
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You can build a professional email address
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So to lock down that domain name that you want
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and to save 10% off your first purchase,
go over to hover.com/thomasfrank and sign up.
Big thanks as always to Hover for sponsoring this video
and thank you as well for watching it.
Hopefully you found something in this video
that can be a useful resource for you in the future.
And if you did enjoy it, hit that like button
and show the YouTube algorithm what's up
and get subscribed if you haven't done so already.
Beyond that, my new channel, Thomas Frank Explains,
has plenty of Notion tutorials going live
all the time on that so check that out
if you're interested in learning how
to use Notion more effectively.
Otherwise I'll have a couple of other videos here
on the screen right here
and right here that you can click on
or smash your face into your phone screen
for extra style points to watch.
Beyond that, maybe consider following me on Instagram
and Twitter at TomFrankly
or don't because as always, I'm not your dad.