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 it's 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 going to be breaking down my top 10 including the one that i think is probably going to 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 sharix 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 tutorials 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 a 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 a 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 built-in 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 them 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 hotkeys for different jobs so i like to use ctrl shift f to add a screenshot directly to my clipboard or ctrl shift c to open up the editor so i can make boxes or arrows or what have you and then i use ctrl shift alt c if i want to use that optical character recognition and pull text out of an image and i also configure my default screenshots folder 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 on 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 instead of 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 opening 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 will 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 it has apple notes which is frankly fantastic but at this point notion has made enough improvements both in its speed and 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 block-based text editors i think whimsical was the first one to really fix it at least that i noticed but now notion is 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 at 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 a notion but what i've really wanted ever since i discovered this app is a full-on second brain template something that would marry tasks and projects and notes and goals and have them all work in harmony but kicking around 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 that'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 a link to the description down below and let's move on to our fourth app in this list which actually takes our word for the most surprising app on the list and it's actually microsoft edge the browser that comes built into windows yes i've 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 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 in 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 our 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 you've ever copied and pasted you probably know 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 want to turn it on all you got to do is hit windows key v it will ask you if you want to 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 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 full 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 to the seventh app on the list which is called espanzo and espanzo 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 long strings of text as well and i personally love espanzo more than say auto hotkey which i used to use for this purpose because espanzo 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 nice and i'm putting flow launcher and espanol 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 espanzo 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 lets you search your files and folders in windows because windows 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 plug-in 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 want to 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 will be complete without an app that gets files off of your computer and syncs them to another destination so they are backed up and also available on other devices as well google drive i think is the best option still even though there is also dropbox and onedrive and other options because for free they give you the most storage space they give you 15 gigs versus one drives 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 going to have a single place that you know to go 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 flux or maybe f lux if you want to 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 brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus that is connected to your eyes and when your eyes intake light waves it essentially adjusts your circadian rhythm and 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 flux 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 flux 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 but 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 flux 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 my video production process as well and that is storyblocks who have kindly sponsored this video if you are a creator if you make videos like i do you definitely want to check out storyblocks because they give you access to a library of more than one 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 into 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-roll ourselves but often there are shots that we just can't get on our own and storyblocks allows us to get a lot of that which allows us to make our content a lot more engaging and another great thing about storyblocks is that they are extremely affordable normally if you want to license stock footage a lot of sites want to charge you hundreds of dollars per clip seriously but with storyblocks you have one low monthly subscription that gets you unlimited access to as many assets as you want they have plans to fit pretty much any budget whether you're a solo creator or running a large team so if you want to 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 storyblocks thank you so much supporting my sponsors is a great way to support this channel as well hopefully you enjoyed this if you found something useful maybe a brand new tool that's going to 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 you in the next one