First time I was part of a team with devs that were more senior than me I tried to improve and gain as many things as I could.

Productivity never bothered me, probably because I was never working at a pace that demanded speed. As time passed by, I saw that all this time I missed out on many habits/tools that I could use.

One of these habits is to keep your hands on the keyboard as much as possible. Avoiding the trackpad or using a mouse is significantly better. You can navigate faster between open apps using the Spotlight Search or just command tab tab tab the hell out of it.

After some time incorporating the above productivity habits into my workflow, I found out that I need more tricks under my sleeve. There was a limitation that got on my nerves and it has to do with not being able to use Spotlight Search with custom parameters, aka arguments whatever you get the point.

For example, writing youtube iron maiden does not open up YouTube with iron maiden as a search query. Another example is, when you have many repos locally on your machine and want to open a repo with VS Code then you have to navigate through Finder or Terminal to a specific folder and then open it up. But here is the solution...

No, the solution is not a paid productivity app. The solution, at least in my case is the Shortcuts app. The combination of Spotlight Search together with Shortcuts app in macOS and some proper personal curiosity is enough to automate many frequent tasks in your workflow. Also make sure to use short, abbreviated naming for your shortcuts to minimize the typing time. E.g. if you want to create a shortcut restart your device then you can name it rst. In case you want to be more descriptive add after the abbreviation something like rst - Restart Your Device. This way you are helping indexing too.

You can

• run shell scripts
• open URLs
• toggle system settings
• etc.

If you have difficulty creating your own shortcut, then ask AI to provide you with a simple example and then prompt it incrementally to add complexity, do not just ask for the result right away. It might mess it up if you prompt it to provide the final result right away.

Concluding,

• press command + tab to open Spotlight
• type inside the name of the shortcut
• press enter and wuala 🥳.