Your new hardware piece is just waiting for you to install the tools that make that shiny new computer useful.
Meetings and keeping track of the day:
NotePlan App
There are so many apps that promise to help you with your todos and meetings, I’ve tried them all, and the only I’ve been able to make stick over a long period is NotePlan. I think what makes it work for me is the mix of structured and unstructured input. The nice thing is that you have your calendar in the sidebar, and it gives you a fresh note for each day and as the day goes by you take notes, add todos in the same note, tag people or projects. So you see, you work in a semi-structured way and the information gets structured. That is the only workflow I have been able to use over a long period.
Meeter
This app I only recently started using, but I love it. It keeps out of your way just until you need it. My days are a mix of Google Meet, Teams and Zoom meetings. This excellent small utility does two essential things for me:
- It gives me a countdown of how long time I have until next meeting, nicely placed on top of my screen
- It gives me the link to the meeting on the correct meeting platform when the meeting starts
Spark Email Client
I have been testing so many email clients for my mac. And I end up back using the built-in email client on macOS every time until I found Spark. I have been using Spark for some years now, and it works well. The app for iPhone and Ipad also works exceptionally well.
I believe we will see some significant innovation coming in the coming years when it comes to email clients, and I will keep testing them all since that is such a vital part of most peoples day-to-day work.
Alfred
This list could not be complete without mentioning Alfred. I use Alfred for everything. Alfred is like a spotlight search on steroids. It’s not the correct place to discuss all the App features, but let me mention one of them that I use most.
Text expander:
Company addresses, standard email responses, code snippets, organisation numbers on different companies, list of email and much more
I use keywords for all of them, and then Alfred replaces the keyword with the predefined text.
Note-taking
Yes, I know Note Plan can be used for note-taking, but that is a part it never could replace for me. I use two different Apps for this area. One is an app everyone loves to hate, Evernote. I use it mainly as an archive, not as a note-taking app, and I use Bear for this one.
For me, the note-taking app has to support markdown; it’s the biggest time saver ever.
And it is also critical that syncing works across my different computers, iPad and iPhone without any problems. One of the things that differentiate the Bear app from other similar apps is how they handle tags. You can directly write for example:
#blog/published and that note are places within a “folder” nested neatly. One note can have many of these tags.
