Remove Repetitive Tasks With Mac Productivity App ‘Alfred’

And save at least 60 hours per year.

Alfred is a productivity app I rarely see mentioned by others, yet it’s incredibly useful and powerful.

Here’s how they describe themselves:

Alfred is an award-winning app for macOS which boosts your efficiency with hotkeys, keywords, text expansion and more. Search your Mac and the web, and be more productive with custom actions to control your Mac.

If you’re a Mac user and are into productivity, you should check it out.

We spend an insane number of hours behind our computers. I wouldn’t dare put a percentage on this, but if you’re anything like me, you’re also spending a big chunk of your time doing the same small actions, visiting the same websites, opening the same files, and typing the same words.

Alfred’s key objective is to save you time.

They do this in 2 ways:

• Automating and/or simplifying these repetitive actions
• Motivating you to use your keyboard to navigate your computer instead of the mouse/trackpad

How much time?

Let’s say I can save 10 minutes per day. That doesn’t sound like a lot until you look at it on a yearly basis.

Just 10 minutes per day saves you 60 hours per year. That’s 7.5 full work days that you could spend on something more interesting.

Here are the key ways I use Alfred:

Launch Alfred

Alfred is like the cooler, older cousin of the native macOS Spotlight: faster, feature-(richer) and more fun.

You bring it up with a quick keyboard shortcut (I use CMD + Spacebar) and then type whatever you want to launch.

Web Search

Here’s where the magic starts: no mouse or trackpad to open your web browser. Just launch Alfred and start typing.

General web search

To search anything on Google, all you need to do is:

• CMD + Spacebar
• Type “Google [question]”