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Managing Our Most Precious Asset
Tools to Reclaim Time in Our Digital Lives
What The New Year Brings Is…
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how much time I spend online and on all of my devices. As it’s many, many hours each day, I’ve been seeking ways — for years now — to help reduce the time I need to be on any of my devices.
So while I’ll be focusing on different software titles today, make no mistake: what I’m really talking about is:
Saving time.
There’s a good reason why I focus on time: it’s limited, it’s our most precious resource, and it’s the one gift we’re all granted in quantities that we’ll never know… until it’s too late.
If there’s a kind of hardware or software which can save me time, I’m VERY interested in seeing how. Here, then, are some of the tools I use to save me time. Nearly all of them are free. Just one request, please:
Try think of time in yearly increments. That way, if using an application only saves you three minutes every day you use it, remember that those three minutes translate to over eighteen hours a year.
It adds up quickly. So the choices you make today, even incrementally, can help you have more time to use for anything that brings you joy, engagement, and fun.
For the macOS
Spectacle
Before Spectacle, I spent a lot of time arranging my application windows so that everything looked exactly the way I wanted on my screen. This often meant dragging and resizing windows so that they’d fill up a specific amount of my screen. If I was researching data for a writing piece, that often meant splitting the screen: on one side was a draft of my essay, on the other side was either a notes application or a photo editor to better shape the kinds of graphics that I share in places like this.
Not anymore. With a few simple keystrokes, I can now automate placing my windows on any side or corner of the screen. Even better, I can decide what percentage of the screen they fill up: 33%, 50%, or 66%. Here’s a quick video I made explaining what that looks like:
