Earlier, I wrote about my favorite tools for interaction design and IA. Now I’d like to follow through by describing the rest of the tools I use for increased productivity.
It really does take years of trial and error and filtering through dozens of products to converge on a set of tools that really work, so let me give you a push start if you haven’t thought about this topic in a while.
Favorite general productivity boost on the Mac: LaunchBar
LaunchBar is my very top recommendation for enhanced productivity on a Mac. It lets me do umpteen most frequently tasks from the keyboard, with close to the minimum number of keystrokes possible:
- open common files and folders
- get to any bookmarked website
- initiate a search in Google or Wikipedia or Amazon or Netflix or Google Maps, etc.
- look up phone numbers
- initiate an email to someone
What is unique about LaunchBar is that it learns the abbreviations you like to use to do these things automatically, without you having to preconfigure anything. As your habits adapt, it adapts.
I use it hundred times a day, never moving my fingers from the home row. No Mac and no Mac user user should be without it. It’s that good. I wrote about LaunchBar at KPAO.
Favorite text expansion tool: Typinator
I’m very judicious when it comes to adding launch-on-boot utilities to my computer. Skeptically, I tried text expansion programs after seeing an article on the topic. Text expansion is when you type something short and it’s expanded into something long.
Text expansion is the sort of thing that you don’t see the need for until you try it. But I gave it a shot and the more I used it, the more SSNiFs arose:
- Expanding frequent but hard-to-type phrases. Typing “pvo” automatically gives me “ProductVision.org”
- Correcting typos. “teh” becomes “the”. There are many many of these pre-built into Typinator.
- Expanding boilerplate: “tbr” changes to “Thanks and best regards,”
- Date and time stamping. I have these two adjacent keys: <;’> return the current date in this format: “12/30/08″, the opposite sequence <’;> give me this format: “081230 ” (which is great for prefixing document and folder names!)
Now I’m pretty dependent on it. I tried a few text expansion tools and I think there are multiple quality products that could work, but I settled on Typinator.
Instant messaging client: Adium (free)
Just one free client handles all the major services. I switch to Skype or iChat when the need to send documents, talk by voice or by video chat arises.
Favorite tool for getting things done: OmniFocus
OmniFocus puts my scattered brain on track, and helps me juggle a dozen projects. When I have a productive day, OmniFocus usually had something to do with it. OmniFocus is always running, so I have it auto-launch when I boot.
<whine>OmniFocus is faithful to Robert Allen’s seminal book, but a bit too faithful. Major wishes: 1. Help me estimate time it will take to do a project 2. Help me plan my day and my week. 3. Make a usable iPhone version. (Despite the tuning tips, it’s simply too slow to accomplish tasks like checking the list or adding something, which need to be instantaneous to be usable. The comparison points are paper planners and the PalmPilot.) 4. Don’t require a context; 99% of what I put in OmniFocus are things I do at my computer, so Dave Allen’s contexts are not very useful to me.</whine>
Favorite handheld PIM/communicator/entertainment/information device: iPhone.
The word iPhone is a misnomer. It would be like calling a car an iCarRadio. The phone is just one of several things it does, and for me, only about 10% of what I use it for. I noticed recently that over the course of a typical excursion across the city I used 8 different apps: Google Maps with GPS to get me to the appointment, email to see if a friend responded to a coffee request, SMS to confirm, Yelp to find a coffee shop, phone to finalize, NYTimes, Facebook and Wikipedia to catch up on news while I waited, photo app to grab a snapshot of my friend. These were the scenarios we envisioned circa 2000 when I contracted with Palm, and they have now come together in a usable package.
I’ve ranted about the iPhone and criticized its inefficient UI and lack of needed buttons. It’s not the best phone in the world, but it is by far the best multi-purpose handheld computer and communicator. I think it is worth the high monthly cost (but I can’t say for sure, because I can’t bear to look at the bill).
Oh the most frequent apps that have bubbled up to my home page are, from top to bottom: iPod, Settings, App Store, Safari, Clock (for alarms & timers), Zenbe lists (shared shopping list), Google Maps, Mail, NetNewsWire (Offline RSS reading. Syncs with my desktop RSS reader. Outstanding!), Facebook (which I think of as Headline News of your friends), NYTimes, Google, Wikipanion, Say Who (voice dialing) and OmniFocus (which I’m going to demote soon because in the 2.5 minutes mine takes to launch I’ve completely forgotten what i needed to record.). In the grey bar I have Phone, SMS, Camera and Calendar. (Sure wish I had physical buttons for accessing those items at any time, like the Palms!) My page 2 apps include Pandora (great!), Instapaper (great!), Weather, Stocks, Twinkle, Yelp, MoMuni (San Francisco transit), Stanza (eBook reading. Great!), Tip and Calculator. I have four more pages of apps I never look at.
Favorite Keyboard: GoldTouch
As I write this, my feet are up on the desk, I’m reclining comfortably with my keyboard in my lap. (I wonder why the world hasn’t discovered that the lap is such a comfortable place to put a keyboard.)
The Goldtouch keyboard is divided into two halves that articulate around a ball joint to match the angle your wrists. Your hands, arms and shoulders are in a natural position. If you have, had or are bound to get repetitive stress injury (RSI) you will appreciate the difference this makes.
[ GoldTouch Keyboard on Amazon
Macro Expander I use: iKey
Who wants to get into programming macros for productivity boost? What a drag. Well, if you are working 2000 hours a year for five, ten, fifteen, years, that’s 30,000 hours of working at a computer. It’s worth taking a few of those hours to learn how to use a macro program.
I don’t think I’ve actually programmed a macro in over a year, but I use them daily without even being aware of it.
Whenever you think, “boy, I wish all programs would standardize on one key for that operation” or “boy I do that operation 100 times a day; I wish I could just hit a command key for that function” then you have an opportunity to fix the issue yourself with a macro program.
Here are some macros I use:
- Globally assign F3, F2 and F1 to Cut, Copy and Paste. This is a wrist saver. You do these operations dozens or hundreds of times a day, and curling your thumb under your palm to hold down the command key and pressing V, C or X is a contortion that hurts if you do them thousands of times.
- Hide the frontmost app by pressing F6. (Deceptively useful!)
- Get each app to agree to increase or decrease text size using the same key
- Get each app to agree to paste and match style using the same keystroke. (Every app has this feature but they all seem to use different keys for it.)
- Disable Cmd-Q in Safari, which I would inadvertently hit when typing Cmd-W to close a tab. That was bad because I’d lose all my tabs. To quit I do it through the menu.
- Get each app to agree to use standard text editing keystrokes (next word, end of line, etc.)
- Copy and paste an object’s style using F5 and F4. Super helpful. I use this a lot in Inspiration.
- Paste a date stamp in various format. This saves not only typing but having to look up the date. You can also use text expander for this.
[TIP: I prefix all my documents with the date in the format YYMMDD (for example, "081231 Mydoc.pdf"). It lets me sort reliably by the date I assign, and carries the critical meta-information of when the document was produced right there with the title. The latest documents in a project folder are always at the bottom (or top if you prefer). When you search for a document, the title tells you immediately whether it's a day old, a year, or five years old. Last Created/Modified/Opened dates have never been reliable, but this is. I've been doing this for 10 years and it's invaluable.]
I happen to use iKey for my macroriffic needs, because it worked when I needed it. But I am glad that I don’t have to edit my macros very often, because the UI is not as easy as it could be. I’m not going to switch now, because I have something that works, but I suggest you read some up to date reviews and see what today’s best product is.
Favorite tool to tell me how much time I have left: Pester (free)
This is another obscure but useful tool. All it does is tell me how long I have left to work on something. To set it up, just click the icon and say how many minutes, or what time, you need to stop. You can set multiple events.
Pester is really useful to get things done and leave time to prepare for for the next activity.
[Design to steal: What would be better is if iCal automatically showed you in the dock icon how many minutes were left until your next appointment. It would then be a hands-off affair.]
Favorite system monitoring tools: ActivityMonitor and MemoryStick (free)
In a perfect world you would never have to think about your computer’s status at all. Just your work. Apple’s out of the box experience pretends that the world is perfect, and it’s difficult to see how the machine is dealing with all those apps you have open and all the tabs you’ve got going in your browser.
But the world is not perfect, and we have to be cognizant of when we are asking our computer for too much. Before launching that phat Adobe app, it really helps to know if you should close something else first. And if the fan is coming on and the machine is getting sluggish, it helps to know that the CPU is sweating on some lame Flash component in a Firefox tab you opened three days ago.
The top of my dock showing Finder, LaunchBar, Typinator, Pester, Activity Monitor, MemoryStick, Dictate, OmniFocus, Adium
My dynamic duo of system monitoring tools, which I have set to open automatically on launch and which are always visible in the dock:
- Activity Monitor, set to show CPU activity in the dock. (ActivityMonitor can be found in your Application/Utilities folder.)
- MemoryStick, an obscure little utility that reflects how much RAM is available. When the sliver of green gets too small, quit something you aren’t using or close some browser tabs to free up some memory.
MemoryStick bings at you when your system starts paging stuff out, meaning you’ve maxed out your RAM and it’s chugging along swapping memory to hard drive. (I set mine to be consistent with the colors you see in System Monitor tab of Activity Monitor.)
The number represents the number of page files you have. If this gets to be 6 or 8, poor you, you probably ran Windows. Gigabytes of your hard drive is now devoted to page files. To remedy, reboot. (Boo! Can this be done without rebooting?)
Favorite speech recognition: MacSpeech Dictate (or Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Windows users)
Speech recognition hit a threshold of usability two or three years ago with version 8 and 9 of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Speech recognition really works, and it has been a wrist savior and productivity booster. The bummer is, it has been a PC-only product all this time.
Because I was writing specs and a book about product vision, my need for wrist relief was great enough to find some way to make Dragon work for me and my Mac. I hacked together a solution. It wasn’t pretty. (spoken word -> headset -> Mac -> Parallels Desktop -> emulated Windows XP -> Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Text output goes from Dragon -> VNC client on XP -> VNC server on the Mac -> foreground Mac app.) Buggy, flaky, but workable when I had serious prose to churn out. It was a pain, but less of a pain than RSI.
After years of waiting, my #1 UI wish for 2008 was granted, and the speech recognition engine for Dragon NaturallySpeaking was ported to the Mac in the form of MacSpeech Dictate. Dictate has only the engine of NaturallySpeaking, not all the nice bells & whistles, so reviewers who knew Dragon complain about it and give it lower stars than it deserves. It’s not perfect, but it works, and it’s hella better than my jury-rigged emulated solution.
Incidentally, my input is multi-modal. I speak prose to the machine, and do corrections and editing with my keyboard and mouse.
When I worked at Microsoft in 1989 few of my co-workers (professional software engineers) could touch type; now most people can. Today, few people speak to their machines, but eventually, most of us will. Speak to a computer is not as intuitive as it sounds. It involves training, practice, and patience, but the investment pays off, just like learning to touch-type does.
Here’s to more investment and even better speech recognition in 2009 and beyond.
[ MacSpeech Dictate at Amazon
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Philip Haine is a product designer and product vision specialist. He founded Obvious Design, LLC in San Francisco in 1997. His other blog on product vision can be found at ProductVision.org.
If only someone would do a calendar strip docked to the edge of the screen, as described here.
http://tinyurl.com/time-strip