Last week I wrote about productivity, including strategies and tactics to combat procrastination, fight distractions, and engage in deep work. If you missed it, you can read it here. This week I wanted to follow that up by sharing all my favorite apps, tools and products for staying productive and optimized.
👍 Favorite apps and services for an optimized life
I covered a lot of this in my bonus podcast episode (🎧 Ep73) but here are my favorites apps, products and services for a productive and optimized life:
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Email: I've been a long-time Gmail user. If you are too, you've got to turn on your keyboard shortcuts because email is 10x faster when you master them. Now, I've switched to using Superhuman, which lets me quickly see all the emails from a single person among my alias accounts. It also has email shortcuts, undo send, delays send, and instantly send functions. It will pull up social profiles for recipients and senders (especially for someone you don't know). I pay monthly to use this product, and I love it. You get one month free at chrishutchins.com/superhuman.
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Calendar: I've used Calendly for years. Nick Gray (🎧 Ep. 68), whom I had on to talk about cocktail parties, has a post on his site that went into all the details of how to use it to be a bit more friendly.
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Storage: I use Dropbox, Google Drive, and iCloud. Dropbox is the primary storage for work and my personal files. Google Drive is for backing things up (and it's replaced Microsoft Office), and iCloud is for all my photos and videos.
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Everything: Notion has become my second brain. There's an entire notion board for our family, where Amy and I do everything from planning upcoming trips, organizing information, kids' activities, doctor visits, and meal planning. I also use it for the podcast for absolutely everything.
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Finding Stuff: I love Alfred. If you're a Mac user, you probably know that you can hit the command + space bar to pull up a search for a file or go to a website. Alfred is the supercharged version of this. I have an emoji library. I use it as a calculator and to find files. The best part is that it will store my entire clipboard history, whether it's images or text. So sometimes, I want to grab a few lines from one email and move it to another; I can copy each one individually and store it in the history for later use. I use Alfred at least 100 times a day.
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Multiple Screens: Another app I use is Rectangle. It moves stuff around the desktop. I often have two windows, so I can change them dynamically to fit my needs. I find that if you pause and drag your mouse or trackpad around, it just distracts me. So if I could just get it out of the way quickly.
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Chrome extensions:
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Library Extension when searching for a book on Amazon to tell me if there's a book available for free at your public library.
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Eno from Capital One lets you create free virtual cards for any retailer. I love that this can generate unique card numbers you can turn off after making a purchase.
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Lusha will auto-pull emails when you are looking at someone's LinkedIn profile.
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don't f*** with paste let’s you paste into fields when sites don't allow it (especially important because I'm much more likely to mess things up if I manually type in, say, an account number).
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Card Pointers extension to manage my credit cards and makes it easy to find the right card to maximize category bonuses and offers on everyday purchases. They also have an amazing app (especially the upcoming iOS 16 version I’ve been testing. If you want to try Card Pointers Pro, you can get a free trial and 20% off here.
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Keepa shows you a chart tracking all the Amazon price history of any item you’re looking at
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OneTab will consolidate and save multiple tabs, so later, I can bring them back.
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Mobile Apps on Desktop: Before I found out you can install and run most iOS apps on a Mac (as long as it has an M1/M2 processor), I used Bluestacks to run Android mobile apps on my laptop. My primary use case was watching our daughters Nanit cams, but I’ve since found so many more.
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Food & Groceries: I love the app Paprika. Every time I want to clip a recipe, it does so quickly and easily. My wife and I use the app to organize what we cook. And then you can take everything and throw it into a grocery list. It auto sorts it, and lets us check things off while shopping.
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Password Manager: I use 1Password. I use it to store and ensure all my passwords are strong. I also use it instead of Google authenticator.
I also want to share some of the hardware I use for the podcast and daily life:
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Microphone: I recommend that almost anyone recording audio get the Audio-Technica ATR2100X. It's a USB and XLR microphone, but the quality is so good. When I first used it for remote meetings, everyone said, "Your audio sounds so good…I just want to hear you say something."
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Headphones: I think the Apple AirPods might be one of the best products of the last decade. I use them for everything except when I record the podcast or when I’m on a long flight (Instead, I use Audio-Technica M50X over-ear headphones).
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Camera and Lights: A good camera and lights significantly boost the video quality. I use Logitech C920 and C930 with an Elgato ring light; I had a Lume Cube before that, which I still use when traveling.
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Teleprompter: I use the ILOKNZI. If you're giving many presentations, it could be worth it. And there's this great app, DuetDisplay, that can turn your iPad into a second screen. So I use the iPad with a teleprompter to take notes and see their faces while I'm looking at the camera.
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Wifi: I think a critical thing for anyone online is wifi reliability. I upgraded to a Unifi system. I don't think I've had to reboot a router in the last 18 months. All the ports route to a dream machine pro device. We also bought Unifi cameras because it's all locally stored, so I'm not using my bandwidth to upload feeds.
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Locks: I love August locks. I haven’t carried a key to our house in years.
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Security: We added a Ring security system, which is a great system.
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Sound: We have Sonos around the house. No surprise to anyone here.
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Health: I wear my Oura ring every day. It tracks my sleep, workouts, heart rate variability, and blood oxygen levels. I think it's such a good product.
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Editor’s Note: Today, I’m grateful for the support of our partners Dry Farm Wines, Vuori, Pacaso, Amazon, Oura, 1Password, CardPointers and Superhuman. Opinions expressed here are the author's alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, hotel, airline, or other entity. This content has not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of the entities included within the post.
