TTL 25
Tiny Apps Fill Small Gaps.
👋 Good Morfternight! Paolo Belcastro here, welcoming you to the twenty-fifth issue of TTL: Tools & Thoughts for Leaders, your weekly dose of leadership insights.
If you are reading this, chances are that, like me, you spend many hours on computers every day. Today, we are not going to debate whether that’s good or bad for you, or whether computers have won the war against humans before even reaching AGI.
Instead, I will introduce you to a few small tools I use that fill tiny gaps in my experience, and make my life much easier.
Small sources of friction, when met frequently and left unchecked, can amount to a very frustrating experience. Eventually, they’ll lead you to dislike the tools you use without being able to identify the reasons, and will make pursuing your passions that much harder.
This connects to the conclusion my colleague Rich Tabor reaches in The Physics of Focus:
The physics of focus is unforgiving but simple: If you want to do something exceptional, be ruthless about what you focus on. Everything else is noise.
Being “ruthless about what you focus on” is much easier if you remove most friction.
Hyperkey
I use my keyboard a lot more than I use my mouse. The ability to create custom shortcuts is one of the most critical features in my day-to-day work. The experience of adding a shortcut used to be based on trial and error, as so many shortcuts based on classic modifiers like the ⌘ (command) or ⌃ (control) keys are already defined by apps, that too often you can’t use the one you want.
Enter Hyperkey, a tiny app that allows you to map the ⇪ (caps lock) key —the one key I never use on my keyboard— to triggering simultaneously the four modifiers ⌘ ⌃ ⌥ ⇧
As you can see in the settings, it also lets you choose which key to use, whether to include ⇧ or not, and even allows you to preserve the original ⇪ function with a quick press (then, again, I never use that function, so I don’t need to preserve anything).
With that, I have a full keyboard of easily accessible shortcuts that I know for sure are not already used by any other application, or macOS itself.
Hookmark
This app can do a lot more than what I use it for, but my simple use case is already worth the license fee. It allows me to create links to almost anything on my computer: emails, files, parts of a webpage, paragraphs of text, etc.
My most common use case is when I create an event on my calendar after reading a message in Slack, Telegram, or Signal, or after receiving an email.
I can create a link to the email or message, and add it to the calendar event. I find this much more practical than copy-pasting the message in the calendar event notes because the conversation can potentially continue, and the pasted text would only be a narrow window on it, while the link brings up the conversation in its entirety.
Hookmark also allows “hooking” any set of items together by dragging them to the app. Although that’s not something I use regularly, I need to experiment more with it.
PopClip
A very recent discovery. It was brought to my attention while testing another app, Inbox AI.
PopClip‘s strength is in the long list of extensions allowing it to connect with many other common apps. Once installed and activated, you select some text, and a contextual menu instantly appears, providing you with access to the other apps you have installed extensions for.
The text you have selected will then be sent to the app you click on, and be handled according to your settings.
In this example, you can see my current setup, and the menu that appears when I selected the paragraph above. From left to right, the actions I have activated are:
- Search in Google (useful since my browsers are set to use Perplexity.ai as a default).
- Send to Obsidian’s daily note. We’ll talk about Obsidian more in the near future.
- Send as a highlight to Readwise. This allows me to avoid browser extensions.
- Send to BBEdit. To this day, the text editor I use most frequently.
- Send to Tana. I am still following its development, although it’s becoming hard to use.
- Send to Todoist as a task. Todoist is the task manager I wish I loved, but hate.
That’s it for today.
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Here on TTL, we dig into practical leadership tips and effective strategies, with a particular focus on tech leadership and managing distributed teams (that’s what I do every day, add me on LinkedIn).
Whether you’re steering a tech startup or leading a remote team, these insights are designed to help you navigate the complexities of modern leadership.
I also publish on paolo.blog and monochrome.blog
Cheers,
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