The 10 Best Windows Productivity Apps in 2022

- I have a central tenant

that I follow for any kind of work

that I'm doing.

And it's this.

If I find myself doing something repeatedly,

there is a process I have to follow all the time over

and over again,

then anything I can do to make

that process more efficient either by making it faster,

removing steps or automating steps, I should do.

And with that idea in mind that today,

I would like to share with you my top 10 favorite productivity apps,

specifically for Windows.

Now I've got a couple of friends who have done these kind of app

roundup lists for the Mac.

And I do use Mac OS.

I use a lot of those apps, but I actually use Windows more often.

I prefer on the desktop platforms

and I haven't seen a whole lot of these videos for us Windows folk.

So today I'm gonna be breaking down my top 10,

including the one that I think is probably gonna be the most interesting for

you.

My surprise pick, one that you're probably not expecting,

a pair that work insanely well together.

They're the ones that I'm most excited to share with you in this video.

And finally, the one that is objectively the most useful app on this list.

One other great thing about this list is

that every app on it is actually free.

So let's get into this list,

starting with the one

that I think you might find most interesting

which is an app called Sharex.

Sharex is a screenshot tool for Windows.

It's free, it's open source.

And I use the heck out of it

because I take a ton of screenshots in my work

and I do this for multiple different purposes.

I do it for content creation.

If you've seen any of my written Notion tutorial over on my website you've

probably seen my screenshots

and animated GIFs but I also use it to communicate more efficiently with my

team.

For instance, the other day my personal website had a bug on it

and I was able to just take screenshots of the bug

and send them in Slack to my developer,

Martin, to show him exactly what was going on.

It's a lot more efficient than trying to type up a long description,

but Sharex has a trick up its sleeve

that a lot of other screenshot apps do not have

which is optical character recognition.

You can actually take a screenshot of some text within a picture

or YouTube video and it will pull

that text out and put it right on your clipboard.

So you can then paste it into your note taking application.

Now I should mention

that there is a builtin screenshot tool within Windows called Snip

and Sketch and it's honestly very capable.

You can use it by hitting Windows, Key, shift S.

You can take screenshots put 'em on your clipboard, draw on them.

But the editor that comes within Sharex is just vastly more powerful

and lets you do things like adding boxes,

drawing arrows adding pixelation and blurring for sensitive info.

It's just overall a lot better.

And that's why I personally like using it over Snip and Sketch.

Now there are a couple of little tweaks

that I add to share X to make it a little bit better.

First I add multiple hot keys for different jobs.

So I like to use control shift F to add a screenshot directly to

my clipboard or control shift C to open up the editor

so I can make boxes

or arrows or what have you.

And then I use control shift alt C

if I want to use the optical character recognition

and pull text out of an image.

And I also configure my default screenshots to live inside of Google drive.

So all my screenshots are available to me across all my different devices.

App number two on this list is called Quick Look.

And if you've ever used Mac OS you probably know there is a function

built into the operating system called Quick Look

which is sadly absent on Windows.

Well, this app brings it in there.

Now in Mac OS Quick Look is a function in finder where you can

basically click on a file without opening it

and see information about

that file in the sidebar.

You can see an image preview, if it's an image,

you can see text inside of a text file.

And the Quick Look app inside the Microsoft Windows store adds this to Windows.

You can click on a file

and without opening it you can just hit the space bar to preview it.

Now, this is less useful for really simple file types like images

or text because notepad

and the Windows photo viewer open pretty quickly

but this also works on Photoshop files.

So I can preview Photoshop files in a very big window without open up

Photoshop.

I can open up animated GIFs

or videos and preview them without launching a dedicated app for it.

So overall really useful tool.

And I love that it has a button that'll let me make the preview

stay on top of other windows,

as I sometimes want to say,

take a screenshot and make sure it floats on top of something else,

just so I can reference it.

App number three on this list and you probably saw this coming, is Notion.

I can't make this list complete without Notion

because I use it every single day.

And there is in fact desktop app.

So I can use it directly on Windows

which means I'm not breaking the rules of this list.

Now I do have a confession to make,

which is that I think

that Mac OS has a greater number of top tier note-taking applications than Windows

does.

It has Ulysses, it has Bear and has Apple Notes, which is frankly fantastic.

But at this point,

notion has made enough improvements both in its speed

and in fixing some of the annoyances I used to have with it

that it is now my favorite note taking application,

in particular, just recently,

they fixed the bug where you couldn't select text precisely across blocks,

which was actually kind of a bug in pretty much all based text editors.

I think Whimsical was the first one to really fix it at least

that I noticed,

but now Notion has done

as well which means

that I can select text like I could in a regular word processor like

Google docs.

And that means I can write

and I can edit precisely inside of Notion

and Notion runs a lot more than just my note taking.

In fact, I run my entire content creation process inside of Notion.

We capture ideas there, we run the entire content pipeline in there from research,

to scripting to editing.

And we even have a library of all of our past videos

so we can pull information from them

when we need it.

That system is called Creators Companion.

I've actually turned it into a template

and you can check it out over@thomasjfrank.com/cc.

And for personal productivity, I like to manage my tasks in notion.

I have a full template for that.

I do my note taking in Notion,

but what I've really wanted ever since I discovered this app is a full

on second brain template.

Something would marry tasks

and projects and notes

and goals and have them all work in harmony.

I've been kicking around with this design in my head for a very long

time.

It's very tough to get right to get the UX to be easily usable,

so it won't turn into a mess later on

but I think I'm just about done designing this template.

And I've got a second channel called Thomas Frank explains.

It's all about Notion build guides and tutorials.

So if you are interested in that kind of thing, check that channel out.

I'll have it link the description down below

and let's move on to our fourth app in this list

which actually takes our award for the most surprising app on the list.

And it's actually Microsoft Edge.

The browser that comes built into Windows.

Yes, I have had Microsoft popping up little things telling me to switch over

from Chrome to edge for years now

but I've always ignored it until I looked up some stats

and found out that Edge is actually a faster browser than Chrome.

And I was getting kind of tired of Chrome just hogging up tons of

resources on my system.

So I decided to give Edge a try.

And what do you know?

It's actually kind of great.

At this point, it's built on top of Chromium

which is the engine

that Chrome is built on.

So it's very familiar.

All the keyboard shortcuts are the same

and crucially you can install extensions from the Chrome Web store into Edge.

Pretty much any extension that works inside of Chrome now works in Edge,

which means that I'm not losing anything by making the switch.

And I'm gaining quite a few things.

Number one, Edge does feel snappier

and it feels like it takes up less resources than Chrome does.

There's even a built in feature

that will put tabs to sleep after two hours by default,

if you're not using them which frees up system resources even more.

But maybe my favorite feature on Edge is

if you go up to your tab bar

and right click you can turn on vertical tabs,

which will move your tabs from being a horizontal list across the top of

the bar to a vertical list on the side,

which means that even if you are a tab hoarder like I am,

you can still see the names of all your tabs,

which you cannot do in Chrome without a third party extension.

App number five on the list is actually one

that is built right into Windows

and it's the Windows Clipboard Manager.

So if you've ever used a clipboard before

if you've ever copied

and pasted you probably know

that the clipboard is one of the most useful functions in any operating system.

But by default, it has one major limitation.

It only remembers the last thing you copied.

It's a lot more useful

if you have clipboard history turned on

so you can see everything you've copied

and you can go back

and paste something old.

And that is exactly what the clipboard history feature does.

So if you wanna turn it on all you gotta do is hit Windows

key V.

It will ask you if you wanna turn it on,

and then you can even sync your clipboard history across devices,

if you want to.

I don't do that

because I put passwords on my clipboard

and I don't really like the idea of having it transmitted across anything

that isn't into my Password Manager

but it is an option

if you want to use it.

And that brings us to one of two apps

that I am personally most excited to share with you in this video.

These two apps work really well as a pair.

So that first app is called Flow Launcher.

And all Flow Launcher does is bring up a small text window on your

computer when you hit a key command by default alt space.

But once it's there,

you can type commands to do pretty much anything on your computer quite a

bit faster than you would by doing it normally.

Again, we're going back to

that concept of taking repeat processes

and making them more efficient.

So with Flow Launcher, I can launch websites.

I can do Google searches.

I can bring up files or directories on my computer.

I can even do calculations quite a bit faster than I would with the

stock calculator app.

And I can even control Spotify.

I can type SP in the name of a playlist

or a song and I can start playing it.

I can turn on shuffle.

I can do all kinds of cool stuff.

I absolutely love Flow Launcher.

And you can customize the heck out of it to just bring up this

little thing and do stuff quite a bit faster.

And I'm just gonna roll right into the seventh app of the list

which is called Espanso.

And Espanso is a text expander app

which you'll find very useful

if you often find yourself typing the same long strings of text,

like your email address

or common URLs or

if you do customer support

or something,

the same exact response to customers.

You can define these very short key snippets

that when you type they automatically expand into

that longer snippet of text.

So for instance I can type EMT to auto expand my email address.

I can type PWF to auto expand my Notion fundamentals URL

which I'm constantly pasting inside of comments.

I can even expand really really long strings of text as well.

And I personally love Espanso more than then say Auto Hot Key,

which I used to use for this purpose

because Espanso also comes with a search bar

that you can bring up very similar to Flow Launchers,

but you can search your snippets

and then automatically paste them without having to type the entire thing,

which is really, really nice.

And I'm putting Flow Launcher and Espanso together because in my workflow,

they work very well in tandem.

Personally, I have to bring up a lot of different directories on my computer

very often.

I've got one for video thumbnails.

I've got one for current projects being edited.

I've got one for my second channel.

So I've defined little key snippets in Espanso

that I can type into Flow Launcher to automatically launch those directories way quicker

than I would get to them

if I was navigating normally

and to continue my complaints about Windows Explorer,

we're gonna move on to app number eight, which is called Everything.

And Everything is a simple utility

that lets you search your files

and folders and Windows

because Windows's folder search

and file search is famously slow.

It takes forever.

And for whatever reason,

everything indexes your hard drive and lets you search pretty much instantly.

Now there was also an Everything plugin for Flow Launcher.

So you can actually use Flow Launcher to search your computer pretty well,

but sometimes you're looking for a file

and you wanna be able to browse a lot more on your screen than

Flow Launcher will show you.

So I also recommend having everything installed by default

so you can use it

when you need it.

App number nine on this list is good old Google Drive.

I don't think this list would be complete without an app

that gets files off of your computer

and syncs them to another destination,

so they're backed up and also available on other devices as well.

Google Drive, I think is the best option still even

though there is also a Dropbox

and OneDrive and other options

because for free,

they give you the most storage space.

They give you 15 gigs versus OneDrive's five and Dropbox is paltry two.

And my tip for using Google Drive efficiently is to ignore the documents, pictures,

music all those different directories on your computer

and instead create a sort of root file system within your Google Drive folder.

That way you're gonna have a single place that you know to go to,

to start looking for files,

if you're not choosing to search for them using say Everything.

And that brings us to our final app on this list

which is probably objectively the most useful app out of any

that I've covered here.

And that is F.lux

or maybe F.lux if you wanna pronounce it

that way.

This is a very small tiny utility

that does one thing

as it gets closer to dark,

to your bedtime, it dims your screen and it makes it warmer.

And the reason it does this is that light,

be it artificial light or sunlight messes with our circadian rhythms.

There's a little part of your brand called the suprachiasmatic nucleus

that is connected to your eyes

and when your eyes intake light waves it essentially adjusts your circadian rhythm

and it can make it harder to fall asleep

or to get quality sleep,

if you're exposed to artificial light late at night.

And as it turns out,

blue light affects this more than other types of visible light.

So the idea behind F.lux

and the idea behind those blue blocker glasses you probably heard about is it

gets rid of some of

that blue light and possibly makes it easier for you to fall asleep

or to have better quality sleep.

So if you find yourself on the computer late at night

or on your phone late at night,

using something like F.lux may actually help you sleep better.

And as we've talked about in many different videos sleep is one of the

three pillars of health with the other two being your nutrition

and your exercise,

that really form the foundation of your ability to get things done.

So all these other tools we've talked about are kind of just, you know,

extra icing on the cake.

F.lux may actually help you live a more healthy life

and hence a more productive one.

Now, earlier I talked about how Notion was my constant companion for my video

production process.

One of my most essential tools for getting these videos done

and done more efficiently.

Let me share one additional resource

that really helps with my video production process

as well.

And that is Story Blocks, who have kindly sponsored this video.

If you are a creator,

if you make videos like I do you definitely want to check out Story

Blocks because they give you access to a library of more than 1 million

creative assets that you get unlimited access to use inside your content.

That includes a B roll and stock footage.

It includes sound effects and music.

So you can level up your sound design.

It includes After Effects templates, motion graphics templates,

tons of stuff that can level up your content.

And to give you a bit of an insight to our actual video production

process we cut down this talking head footage to what we call an A

roll cut.

At that point, my team

and I come up with B roll ideas to go on top of

that A roll and we do shoot some of

that B or selves

but often there are shots

that we just can't get on our own.

And Story Blocks allows us to get a lot of

that which allows us to make our content a lot more engaging.

And another great thing about Story Blocks is that they are extremely affordable.

Normally if you wanna license stock footage a lot of sites wanna charge you

hundreds of dollars per clip,

seriously, but with Story Blocks you have one low subscription

that gets you unlimited access to

as many assets as you want.

And they have plans to fit pretty much any budget whether you're a solo

creator or running a large team.

So if you wanna start leveling up your content and get started,

go over to storyblocks.com/thomas to sign up

or go to the link right there on screen.

If you do choose to use Story Blocks,

thank you so much for supporting my sponsors.

This is a great to support this channel as well.

Hopefully you enjoyed this.

If you found something useful,

maybe a brand new tool that's gonna help your workflow hit

that like button for the algorithm.

And if you're looking for something else to watch I've got a great companion

video for this one on the best browser extensions for productivity

or if you are a Notion user,

I just made a brand new video on 10 things you might be doing

wrong in your Notion workspace. check those out

and I'll see yet in the next one.