Sindre Sorhus loves unicorns, even to the point of ranking pictures of them. And even more whimsically to me, also loves creating dozens of high quality apps. The majority of them free (!) for some baffling reason.
Check out the full list (Mac apps, iOS apps, Apple Watch apps, and Apple Vision apps), and I bet you’ll find something that will delight you.
Or if you’re short on time, here’s my faves for being more productive:
Day Progress
Day Progress gives you all kinds of ways of measuring how much time you have left in your day, displayed as a customizable icon in your menu bar.
In my case, I selected with a pie chart that tracks when I will (ideally) finish my workday.
I hear you saying, “have you heard of something called…a clock?” But there’s two ways I find it superior to a standard clock:
- It’s intuitive: even though I feel like I have a good sense of where 3:41PM lies in my day, seeing that expressed in pie chart form is significantly easier to me to comprehend at a glance while lost in thought. I’ve been using the app for almost a year now, and have started to notice subtle things, like when in the day my motivation, energy, and focus tend to rise and fall, something I’d never noticed to the same degree with a standard clock.
- It’s visceral: there’s something inherently motivating about a pie slice getting smaller and smaller as you watch. Or realizing you’ve lost an eighth of your day because you convinced yourself it was important to learn about flat earthers.
Give it a shot, it’s free. You might also enjoy Sindre’s related app, Pandan.
One Thing
One Thing helps me in doing what I call the Monobrow Technique. Actively committing to something from my to-do list by slapping it “right up between my eyes” like a monobrow.
Something about the commitment and the always-in-your-periphery reminder is really effective for me, and One Thing works perfectly for that. It allows you to quickly assign text that appears in your menu bar, making it always visible.
I go the extra mile of setting it to be extra big, and just as neon as an 80’s aerobic video:
I then occasionally tweak the colors to a different aerobic-video color so that my brain doesn’t start ignoring the text.
I also intentionally play a mental achievement fanfare in my head each time I successfully complete the task I’d set out for myself. Better to associate that area of your computer with a feeling of achievement, not guilt/dread.
One Thing is also free, so give it a shot. You can always angrily ⌘+drag it off your menu bar if you don’t like it. That’s my favorite way to show an app who’s boss.
If you found this interesting, I’ll be sending out more tidbits about Mac apps + productivity/procrastination on my free email newsletter. It goes out every month…or three:
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