This week, summer officially began with the summer solstice (I live in the Northern Hemisphere). It’s the longest day of the year, or at least the day with the longest period of sunlight. Will you be stuck inside all summer dealing with your email? You don’t have to be. You can make this fantasy a reality with SaneBox, MacSparky’s sponsor this week.
You can get your inbox a whole lot cleaner. How? You’ll train SaneBox to figure out what are important and unimportant emails to you. The emails don’t disappear. The unimportant ones go to your new SaneLater folder, allowing you to focus on what’s important. You’ll keep the distractions at bay, and can delete the unimportant ones later, all at once. You’ll get an email digest each day that summarizes what’s in your SaneLater folder, and if you see something that shouldn’t be there, you can train SaneBox to re-direct it to the right place. Get your email sanity back. Get your time back. Enjoy the longer days, the warmth of the sun, and the fresh air, and get out from those emails that are wasting your time. Give it a try with a free trial, and you can get a $10 credit you can use towards a SaneBox subscription.
For small businesses, it can be difficult to stay on top of clients, leads, and projects that are evolving every day. Here’s how Daylite can help supercharge your team to collaborate better, handle more clients, close more deals, and execute more projects. Designed for Mac, iPhone, and iPad exclusively.
Daylite is more than just a CRM app for small businesses. Its Productivity capability is what sets Daylite apart from other web-based competitors.
Here are a few productivity-boosting power features that thousands of Mac-savvy businesses couldn’t do without:
Daylite Mail Assistant (DMA)
Direct Apple Mail integration allows you to take action from your inbox and be more productive. Instead of drowning in emails all day, you and your team can capture all email communication, clear out your inbox and stay on top of the next steps. Save emails related to clients, appointments, and tasks, so you have a full history of conversations in one place. Plus, you can create tasks in Daylite right from Apple Mail.
Linking
Its linking capability is what makes Daylite shine. You can link emails, notes, tasks, projects, appointments, and other records to existing contacts in Daylite. This enables teams to quickly and clearly view an organization’s structure and access the information they need in a unique way.
Daylite Calendar
Daylite’s built-in calendar allows you to view your entire team’s schedule in one place. Set reminders for follow-ups and book meetings, so everyone stays in the loop and is always on top of their appointments. Set your calendar to “public” or “private”, so team members can only have access to the information they need.
CRM + Project Management
Daylite’s productivity-focused design helps you and your team get more done throughout the full customer lifecycle. From meeting prospects and winning business to managing the moving pieces on projects, all the way through to following up on referrals and repeat business, it’s all done in Daylite.
Daylite empowers small businesses by improving team efficiency and making collaboration easy—everything is organized, searchable, and accessible (even offline). You can easily access information and segment data tailored to your specific client’s history.
This week MacSparky is sponsored by DEVONthink. DEVONthink has been offering AI-based research tools for years on the Mac, but it has hardly stood still. DEVONthink is now on version 3 for the Mac and version 3 of DEVONthink to Go for iPad and iPhone. The apps are modern and take full advantage of the most recent and powerful tools available in the Apple Ecosystem. They just keep evolving right alongside Apple.
But when it comes to metadata, DEVONthink is leaving Apple (and the Finder) in the dust. DEVONthink has its own systems for organizing, tagging, sorting, automating, and updating all sorts of metadata for your files. One example is that I store contracts I’m writing for clients in DEVONthink. I use the app’s Annotations metadata to store notes on drafts of contracts. These are notes that only I see but prove invaluable when I come back a month later and ask, “why does this exist?” DEVONthink runs circles around the metadata tools available to you with the native Finder. Using the full array of DEVONthink metadata tools I’m able to cut through my files and get to what matters most fast.
And better metadata is just one of many features you’ll get with DEVONthink. To learn more head over to DEVONthink and download the trial and check it out for yourself.
Sometimes we subscribe to a newsletter or other mailing list because we want to keep up with what’s going on, or know when the next sale is, or if they’re offering a good discount code. We signed up because we don’t want to miss out. These emails can be very informational and fun, but not something I need to deal with during an average workday. These distractions not only clutter up your inbox, but they take from your focus and time. This is where this week’s MacSparky sponsor SaneBox comes in.
SaneNews is a great feature of SaneBox. You can train newsletters or other mailing lists you’ve subscribed to to go there. SaneBox doesn’t delete these emails. It takes these lower priority emails you don’t have deal with right now, and automatically puts them in the SaneNews folder (once you’ve trained it) so that they’re there for you to look at when you do have the time to check out the news articles or latest promotions.
My thanks to TextSniper for sponsoring MacSparky.com this week. This is an app that I use … often.
TextSniper is a Mac OCR app that can extract text anywhere on your Mac’s screen and automatically save it to your clipboard so that you can paste it anywhere you need it. It can even read the text to you. The whole thing works a lot like the built-in screen capture on the Mac, just way more powerful.
Also, TextSniper doesn’t collect your data. The text recognition is processed on your Mac and does not require an internet connection.
With TextSniper, you can:
Quickly get a text from PDFs, Zoom calls, Presentations, and Videos.
Copy text from anywhere, even images and websites that don’t let you select text.
Quickly grab data like email addresses, phone numbers, and links.
Read QR codes and barcodes.
Get text out of just about any image format, including JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, and BMP.
I find myself using TextSniper constantly in my daily work. Earlier this week I was signing up for a conference I’m about to attend. The website had a picture of my registration, but didn’t render it as text. That’s right. A picture. So when I needed to get my 12 digit sign up code, I just TextSnipered it out of the image into text and pasted it into the online form. Once again, TextSniper to the rescue.
TextSniper works with macOS Catalina and later and also works with Parallels Desktop
Get TextSniper now and enjoy the fastest way to copy uncopyable text, wherever it may be. Use promo code TS2022 to get an additional 25% off.
This week MacSparky is sponsored by DEVONthink. There are a lot of ways to manage a database on your mac, but in my opinion, there is no better tool than DEVONthink. Just a few of the things I use DEVONthink for include:
A reliable repository of research documents. DEVONthink will hold as many documents as you can throw at it. In addition, it makes import (and export) easy, so you can have all that power without feeling trapped.
A research assistant. DEVONthink uses artificial intelligence to analyze and connect your documents in ways that may not otherwise occur to you.
An OCR Tool. Everything you store in your DEVONthink Pro library gets OCR’d. It just happens.
An Automation Tool. DEVONthink lets you build powerful automation subroutines into your library to help tag, move, and organize documents.
One of my uses for DEVONthink is managing all of my personal documents. I dump bills, invoices, tax records, and all the other bits of personal files that come my way into my personal records DEVONthink database. It automatically sorts them and syncs them for me using my own password. If I need to find anything, the DEVONthink search engine is always up to the task.
DEVONthink supports multiple sync methods and lets you even use your own sync password, so everything is encrypted. If you’ve got an iPad or an iPhone, you can access your DEVONthink data there, too, with DEVONthink to Go.
It is this combination of power and security that makes DEVONthink the clear winner. You can think of DEVONthink as your paperless office. You can automate your workflow from capture to filing, editing to publishing. It stores all your documents, helps you keep them organized, and presents you with what you need to get the job done.
Daylite is more than just a CRM app for small businesses. Its Productivity capability is what sets Daylite apart from other web-based competitors. Here is an example of one of Daylite’s unique features – Daylite Mail Assistant (DMA). Direct Apple Mail integration allows you to take action from your inbox and be more productive. Instead of drowning in emails all day, you and your team can capture all email communication, clear out your inbox and stay on top of the next steps. Save emails related to clients, appointments, and tasks, so you have a full history of conversations in one place. Plus, you can create tasks in Daylite right from Apple Mail.
DMA automatically scans the email addresses in the “To” and “Cc” fields. If the person is a prospect and there is no prior correspondence, with two clicks, you and your team can store that first email as a piece of history in the Daylite database. DMA then searches for additional contacts or objects associated with that prospect. If another person at the prospect’s firm has been in contact about your offer and been identified as an open Opportunity in Daylite, that Opportunity and its related history will appear, allowing you to link it to the most recent prospect.
DMA can also display upcoming Tasks and Appointments with prospects and customers and add new ones if required, providing a handle on deliverables to anyone for your business who needs to know. DMA is only one of the many productivity-boosting power features that thousands of Mac-based small businesses couldn’t do without. To learn more about how Daylite, the made-for-Mac, iPhone & iPad CRM and productivity app, has become a game-changer for Mac-based small businesses. Learn more here.
This week MacSparky is sponsored by Timing. Timing is a time tracking app that automatically records your time and then reviews it later.
Making positive changes in your life requires good data. How much time are you spending doing your work versus planning your work? How much time do you sink into YouTube, Amazon, and the like on an average day? You might think you know these things, but until you run accurate timers, you really don’t know.
That’s where Timing comes in. With Timing, you instantly see how you are spending your time so you can work more productively and make smarter decisions about how to spend your time.
The Timing app makes recording and reviewing your time easy with automatic tracking and a simple interface for adding details about what you did each day so you can see how much time was focused on each task. In addition, you can use Timing to share projects and times across your team while preserving each team member’s privacy.
I use Timing for my time tracking because the data is so good, and catching up is easy. Some days I may forget to log time, but it is trivial for me to tell exactly when I finished one thing and moved on to another with all the Timing data. Want to hear more about how I time track? We covered that on a recent Mac Power Users episode.
One of the nice things about being a small, independent publisher is that I get to be picky about who I allow to sponsor MacSparky.com. This week’s sponsor, Hoban Cards, is one of my favorites. I first met the folks at Hoban Press years ago, when I was tired of handing cheapo business cards out to legal clients. The gang at Hoban helped me make an excellent calling card with their 1902 letterpress machine that every client, upon receiving one, made favorable comments on. (Watch the Hoban letterpress process in action.) First impressions count. My Hoban Cards are excellent ambassadors.
Over the years I bought more legal business cards, then MacSparky cards, and now I have them print my personal stationery. I just love giving quality paper products to other people. Hoban Cards makes the process easy. Just go to Hoban Cards and push a few buttons and then they arrive in the mail.
Evan and the gang at Hoban Cards are entirely dedicated to making the best possible calling cards. They have some beautiful templates to choose from, or you can roll your own.
Put simply, Hoban Cards is where you go for the unique and classy alternative to conventional, mass-produced, soulless business cards. Best of all, use ‘MacSparky’ to get $10 off any order. I’ve been carrying Hoban cards for years and I intend to keep carrying them for the duration. You should too.
