Hey! So there are a lot of really cool software out there that can help boost your productivity and help you ensure that you get to spend more time on the things that truly matter to you (whatever that may be!). Going forward, I will be sharing some of these with you! The idea is to keep these articles short and to the point – and then I may create more in-depth guides in the future, including video tutorials. Please note that, beyond the software Weava, which I will share about in the future, I have no affiliation with any of the software at all. I simply share about them because I like them.
And a part of the reason why I want to share these tools is because the ironic reality is that it often can become quite unproductive to try out new tools – many of which will simply not work for you. And so, by me sharing some of my recommendations, that could possibly give you some insight into the tools and then you can assess whether they may be something for you. We’re all different – and there is no magic bullet that will solve all inefficiencies, but there are certainly tools that can help along the way.
And so today we’re covering TextExpander – which I use every single day.
TextExpander – The Basics
If you spend a decent fraction of time on the computer, then this tool is for you. Think about how often you are typing certain identical phrases on your computer, be it your email address, home address, “Best Regards” or whatever. Wouldn’t it be nice to have brief shortcuts to help you type those much, much quicker?
In their own words, “TextExpander helps you work faster and smarter so you can focus your time on your most important work.”
In its core basics, what TextExpander enables you to do is to create shortcuts on your keyboard. So that, instead of typing out your full email address, you can for example just type “em;” for it to populate with your email address.
Personally, I have found that appending any shortcut with “;” makes the most sense to me. It’s easily accessible on the keyboard while also not being a key that I use often for other purposes. Because, if you only use the shortcut “em” without the semicolon, then think about how many times a day you would accidentally trigger the shortcut. For example, if you were to write “empower” then the “em” part of that would have triggered the shortcut and you would have ended up with something like: “[email protected]” – which you obviously don’t want.
TextExpander – Making Further Use of It
In terms of how I use TextExpander, the aforementioned trick with email address is just the tip of the iceberg. A day in my life – having either started or continuously supporting numerous companies and projects – there is a whole host of information that often needs to get recalled for various reasons – and it quickly becomes tedious to have to look these up every time there is a need for those. Examples of this include style guide colors codes, bank account numbers, website and social media URLs and more.
For example, instead of looking up the social media links to Weava, I can simply type “wsoc;” anywhere and it will populate with the following:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/weavatools FB: https://www.facebook.com/weavatools IG: https://www.instagram.com/weavatools/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/weavatools YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/weava
Or if I want to recall FSI‘s color scheme, I just type “fsicol;” anywhere to get the following:
ea6836 ORANGE #62b7ae GREEN #4e4e4e DARK GREY
This saves me so much time and I find myself doing these types of shortcuts all the time.
During these COVID times, the shortcuts I probably use the most are shortcuts to respective team Zoom or Google Meets meeting links, as it’s just so neat to type the shortcut in the browser search bar and it automatically takes you to the right place.
Taking TextExpander One Level Further
Now, taking the tool one step further, there are various aspects of my role that may require much lengthier replies – such as handling customer support tickets at Weava. We have therefore created many relevant TextExpander shortcuts for various customer support replies. However, naturally, we do not want to come across as robots, so we make sure to customize elements for each support ticket, but all the main informative content is included in a standard solid manner.
Length is simply not an issue.
TextExpander TLDR:
- Website: https://textexpander.com/
- Price: 3.33 USD per month
- Trial: 30-day trial
- Free alternative: Jitbit’s “Auto Text”