In Praise of Boring Productivity Tools

The non-AI tools that will actually improve your productivity

This little strip you can’t make anything out of is the top edge of my screen. Let’s call it my boring productivity stack.

I thought I’d do a little recap of these little gems because of where we are with software today:

While every software vendor is busy doing that, there are small utilities that make a computer pleasant to work on. What’s even better is that most of these tools don’t need a subscription; exceptions apply, but most are either free or have a one-off pricing model – the way software was meant to be, if you ask me.

They also don’t come from tech giants – they come from individual developers or SMEs. As a result, they get no budget considerations, and are not allowed on most corporate laptops, which is a crying shame.

None of this is a recommendation; it’s just stuff people don’t necessarily know exists and that I find really useful, so maybe you do, too, though YMMV obviously.

Let’s start with the five biggest time-savers:

1. Superwhisper. Okay, so technically this is AI, so I’m already kind of cheating. It is, however, an excellent voice-to-text tool that works into any text field, and either with or without an LLM massaging your text. This is dictation-that-actually-works I spoke about in microphone piece here. The past week alone, I have talked an average book’s worth into it, saving me about 4 hours of typing time.
   
   Superwhisper deserves a special mention in that it is one of the few tools that caters to graceful degradation; you can use a state-of-the-art speech-to-text model like Scribe v2, processed by a frontier AI model when you can, and seamlessly switch to using a completely locally-run Whisper model (and your local LLM like Qwen3.8 27B model if you want) when you have to, want to, or need to stay completely local.

2. aText is a text expander. Type a short code you define, like “;dt”, and you get the current date, e.g. 09/09/26. You can set as many shortcuts as you want; it’s super-useful for addresses, phone numbers, or those long prompts that you use often.

3. Morgen. Every calendar I have – Google, Outlook, iCloud, several of each - in one view. The app is great. The scheduling links and time blocking for to-do lists are even better.

4. Copy ‘Em. A clipboard manager. Everything you copy is there, searchable, pinnable into lists, pasteable in batches or stripped of formatting on the way out. It’s one of those things that once you get used to it, you don’t know how you did things before.

5. Dropover. Start dragging a file or whatever, give the cursor a little shake, and a floating shelf appears to hold it while you go and figure out where it actually needs to go. Collect more things from different places, then move the lot in one drop; or resize, zip, or upload them straight off the shelf and copy the link. This all sounds gimmicky and kind of pointless, but belongs to the same “how did I ever manage without this”-category as the above.

That’s it for the bulk of the time-saving stuff. The following could be classified as more marginally interesting quality-of-life improvements:

1. DockDoor creates hover-over previews for the macOS dock so you see what’s in the window you’re about to change into.

2. TextScoop. Makes any text on your screen behave like text, even if it isn’t. Drag a box over anything - a frame of video, a locked PDF, an error dialog that won’t let you select, a table in someone’s screenshot - and it’s on your clipboard as text. It also scans QR codes off the screen, which sounds pointless until it isn’t.

3. BetterTouchTool. Custom trackpad gestures, keyboard shortcuts, window snapping, and a scripting layer for anything the Mac won’t do natively. It can do a lot, but I mainly use it for window and desktop management.

4. Dell Display Manager. I run two Dell monitors, and this is how I adjust them in sync without poking at buttons under the bezel like it’s 2009.

5. Downie. Downloads video from pretty much anywhere.

6. NepTunes, a Last.fm/Apple Music scrobbler that puts what’s playing in the menu bar with controls. Currently on a track called Sauna. I did not plan this.

Then there’s the not-so-exciting-but-very-important security-related stuff:

1. Santa. A binary authorisation system, an element of my somewhat-hardened OS. It watches every executable that tries to launch and decides whether it’s allowed to.

2. Little Snitch. A firewall. Every time an app tries to talk to the internet, Little Snitch tells you where it’s going and asks whether that’s alright, and stops it if not. Once you spend a week seeing where everything is connecting to, you’ll never read the phrase “we value your privacy“ the same way again. Breaking news: a whole bunch of that activity is not necessary at all. Every normal person I’ve shown the map of active connections to has been shocked by it, and that’s after me blocking a ton of it.

3. Mullvad VPN, whose red open padlock means it’s off right now, because I’m at home; on any Wi-Fi I don’t own it goes on before anything else does.

4. 1Password. Passwords, passkeys, one-time codes, SSH keys, secure notes, the lot. If you’re still reusing and memorizing passwords, stop reading and go fix that now. You really need a password manager today.

5. Parallels Desktop. This houses a Windows environment for when a client insists on having one. More interestingly, it also houses a sealed-off Mac inside my Mac, where I run fully agentic, full-computer-control AI agents. They get an entire machine to click around in, but they don’t get access to the main work machine.

And the last category could be classified as ‘pointless geekery’; these have nothing to do with productivity, but I like them.

1. The clock, and a bunch of other icons like SSD, CPU, MEM, DL/UL status etc are supplied by iStat Menus. The time opens a multi-city world clock, which I love because for such a mathematically simple thing, time zone conversions frustrate me disproportionately. All the icons sound like clutter, but can be very useful.

2. TG Pro sits inside that system monitoring cluster. Every temperature sensor in the machine, plus better control of the fans, which comes in handy when working on some heavy local LLMs in LM Studio

The icons also have all the usual AI things, like ChatGPT and Claude, a bunch of macOS stuff for focus modes, Time Machine, battery, Wi-Fi and the likes. I will ignore them. It even has Teams, reluctantly, and I will extra-ignore that one.

So what?

Some of this unnecessary.

Some of it also provenly, quantifiably, and significantly helpful to productivity.

If there’s something new here, you may want to pick up just one or two of these. Don’t take too many at a time, because it takes time for a lot of this to become muscle memory.

Another time: the boring productivity software that doesn’t live in the menu bar. There’s a lot there, too.

If I’m missing something, don’t tell me. I’ve got enough.

(Kidding. Do tell. I may or may not try it, no promises.)