Like most knowledge workers, I spend about 8-9 hours everyday in front of my laptop — coding, writing, or consuming content (text/video).
Coding or writing are acts of crystallizing your thoughts and producing something new. And you'd agree with me that any such activity is bottlenecked by the physical limitations of tools you use to convert your thoughts on paper (or the computer disk).
I've stopped counting how many times a fresh insight was completely lost because I couldn't write/type it fast enough.
So I view productivity tools not just as a means to race through my to-do list but also as a way to be more creative.
When you can compress the lag between what you think and what you do, a new dimension opens up. Instantaneous feedback allows your interaction to become sort of like a play. As the friction between your action and its results reduces, you're able to internalize the patterns and ideas. The more you internalize, the less burden it has on your working memory and thus opens up the space for new thoughts - thoughts that haven't been thought before.
That's one reason I'm a big proponent of touch typing and keyboard shortcuts.
Here's a list of some of my productivity tools -
Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It has a quick and easy interface to search through your clipboard items. Available for Windows only. ~~For Mac, I use Ditto Stack which is paid and not as feature rich as Ditto but does the job.
Pelican another clipboard manager for Mac. I've switched from Ditto Stack to Pelican because Pelican has support for images in the clipboard.
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Firefox plugin Multi account containers lets you segregate the browser tabs into isolated instances (color coded, custom names and rules for associating websites). Cookies are separated by container, allowing you to use the web with multiple identities or accounts simultaneously.
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Temporary containers allow you to create disposable containers (unlike multi accoutn container which are pre-defined). Saves you the trouble of clearing local storage everytime.
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Chrome/Firefox plugin Vimium is for mouse-free browsing. You can pretty much do everything on a browser with keyboard shortcuts.
Anki is an intelligent flash card program that makes remembering things easy. It's based on the idea of spaced-repetition. Though using someone else's Anki decks isn't much useful but I am sharing mine just in case you want to have a look.
Anki is available on Mac, Windows, Android and iOS.
It allows you to keep the distraction away. Currently available for only Mac.
With Macbook's natural scrolling on trackpad, it becomes a problem when you connect a mouse. Scroll Reverser allows you to set scrolling direction per device, i.e. you can keep the natural scrolling direction for track pad and reverse it for mouse.
Tiddly Wiki is a note taking software. It's like a quine - a self replicating html file - with a rich library of plugins. I use it to host my notes as static website on github.
Amethyst is a Tiling window manager for macOS. Helps you rearrange (quickly) the windows in a tiled layout, cycle through them, resize them, etc. — all with keyboard shortcuts. Checkout this 30 sec demo
Very useful tool for automating stuff in windows. I primarily use for remapping keyboard keys and custom shortcuts etc. My autohotkey scripts