How I Boost My Productivity Using Alfred

Surely you can think of a bunch of productivity tools you’ve heard of and wondered if you should invest your time to learn and configure them to your needs.

For me, that was the case with Alfred. For those who aren’t familiar — Alfred is a productivity app for macOS which boosts your efficiency with hotkeys, keywords, text expansion and more.

So after playing with the premium version (PowerPack), I found that several features help me boost my productivity dramatically. If you want to read about the features of the free version you can check this great post.

Clipboard Manager

There are several solutions to manage your clipboard history. Alfred has a great one.

Clipboard History Setup Page

I use ⌘⌃⇧C as the hotkey. This is how it looks like:

Clipboard History

You can clear the clipboard history (or a part of it) by using the clear command.

Snippets and Text Expansion

You can save your frequently used words, symbols and text using snippets and quickly type them out through keyword or browse them on Alfred Viewer. Note that you can edit the fonts of the text and Alfred will try to keep it when pasting.

Snippets Setup Page

Let’s break it down to 3 levels —

Novice - The Basics

Have a list of keywords for your day to day use — email, home address, phone number (you can have different snippets for different formats), postcode, etc.

Proficient - import

You can import some great snippets! Find here some examples, 3 of them are really great:

Mac symbols — I haven’t known a fast way to type the cmd symbol (⌘) until I’ve downloaded the mac symbols snippet. Now I can easily type with !!cmd(!!)

Currency Symbols — easily search the top currency symbols through the viewer —

Emojis — find and use all emojis without using the mouse!

1. “Slack-a-like” shortcuts say :star: ( ⭐)
2. Through search —

Note that the snippet doesn’t have all emojis, but 1,349 is a good start… and you can add your favorites quite easily.

Expert — dynamic snippets

Create dynamic snippets with {queries}.

Dates — today, tomorrow, different formats, etc. For example, the syntax {date:yyyy-MM-dd} will give you the result 2020–01–20, and {date+1D:yyyy-MM-dd} will give you tomorrow’s date with the same format. {date:yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss} will give you the current time.

Note that you can build a snippet that will give you the date in X days (that you can set on the Alfred bar), but that requires a workflow (we’ll come to it shortly),

Dynamic text — for example, using {clipboard} to add copied text to the snippet —

Example of a dynamic snippet

Workflows

This is Alfred’s most powerful tool.

Workflow can replace repetitive tasks by integration with your favorite Mac applications and web services, from social networks and note-taking apps to shopping and music services.

Import

There are hundreds of ready to use workflows for Alfred, I’ve picked for you the ones I use

1. AirPods Connector — after a quick setup you can connect/disconnects your AirPods with a hotkey! Note that you need to install a package through brew.
2. Spotify Mini Player — Spotify addicts — this workflow is for you! After a quick setup you’d be able to create hotkeys for every action on Spotify — show playlist, search, play/pause, shuffle on/off and much more.
3. Kill Process — kill a process without opening the activity monitor.
4. Numi — a calculator and convertor of different units. You need to download the app and then the workflow.
5. Harakiri Mail — get a temporary email address and an inbox to signup for websites that you don’t want to share your real email. Note that some websites reject email addresses from this service.
6. Start Audio or Screen Recording — shortcut to audio/screen recording through QuickTime. The link is for audio recording. It easy to create a screen recording workflow as well.
7. Quickly Shorten URLs — set a short URL on the fly through Alfred menu bar.
8. Video Downloader — easily downloading videos (and/or extracting audio) from various websites such as YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion and more.
9. IncognitoClone — clone your current tab on Chrome to an incognito window.
10. Time Zones — shows a list of your favorite cities and their current local time.
11. Date Calculator — Alfred workflow to display or calculate with the current date and time. I’ve created two different workflows for two different formats — one with time and one without.

Custom Workflows

As you can see from the list above, there are endless features we can use to make our lives easier. I’ll show you a basic one from Alfred’s templates — templates for different emails/responses. You can import the workflow through Alfred’s templates by clicking + → Getting started → Snippet triggers.

1. The first block is the trigger for running the snippet, set to //hellomsg
2. The second block is in charge of what will appear on the bar when triggering the snippet
3. The third block has the template itself, on our example

Hello {query},

Welcome to the club! You've earned your membership. :)

Cheers,
Vero

And the result -

Other Features

Here are some other features that I haven’t elaborated on but worth mentioning:

1. Quick web-search — Google, Google Translate, Facebook, Google Drive, Gmail, Youtube, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Amazon, eBay and many more.
2. Dictionary — Define and Spell commands.
3. Advanced tools — quick terminal commands, workflows for developers, etc.

Summary

Alfred is a powerful app that can make our life easier and increase our productivity significantly. Overall, I think it’s great value for money as the price isn’t that high and it’s a one-time payment and not a monthly subscription.

Feel free to share your favorite workflows in the comments 🚀