This week MacSparky is sponsored by Daylite. For small companies, staying on top of clients, leads, and projects can feel chaotic. Daylite helps you streamline your workflow so you can win more business and get more done.

Daylite is a CRM that helps businesses manage more clients, close more deals, and finish more projects. Daylight integrates with Apple Mail, and you can share it with your team to keep everyone in the loop. It also is fully compatible with Big Sur and M1-powered Macs.

Because Daylite is a native app, it can work seamlessly with many of Apple’s built-in features. You can share contacts between Apple Contacts and your Daylite database. You can use features like Siri and Caller ID on your iPhone. Daylite also includes full support for FaceID and TouchID. One of my favorite integration tricks with Daylite is the ability to create contracts and other documents by pulling data from Daylite into Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.

I’ve heard from readers in real estate, sales, design, and the legal industry, all using Daylite to run their business. No matter what your business is, Daylite can help you track leads, stay on top of clients, and deliver projects on time.

If you sign up for an account, the complimentary onboarding support will help you get started. Want to harness all the power of your Apple hardware for your business? Start your free 30-day Daylite trial today!

I like having one less thing to deal with. SaneBox, MacSparky’s sponsor this week, helps me tremendously with this. People aren’t going to send you less emails, but with SaneBox, you can see your more important emails while the less important ones are moved out of your inbox. SaneBox’s AI and machine learning will filter into a separate folder and then summarize them in a digest so you don’t get overwhelmed but the number of emails and can focus on the things that really need your attention.

Imagine, instead of checking and managing work-related emails, and having to recover your productivity from an email interruption, or not having to ask yourself, “What was I doing?”, you could just get stuff done. With our SaneBox robot friends, you can:

• Wake up every day to find the SaneBox robots have automatically sorted your incoming email for you so you can address the important and ignore the irrelevant. 

• Defer email for hours, days, or weeks, so it is out of your life until a more appropriate time. They’ve even added a new feature that can optionally auto-reply to snoozed email with something like, “I’m sorry, but I’m underwater right now. I’ll get back to you in a few days.” SaneBox can even auto-reply when you defer an email.

• Set secret reminders so if someone doesn’t reply to an important email, SaneBox gives you a nudge to follow up.

• Automatically save attachments to the cloud (like Dropbox).

• Use their SaneForward service to automatically send appropriate emails to services like Evernote, Expensify, and Kayak.

• Move unwanted email to the SaneBlackHole and never see anything from that person again.

I love SaneBox and other MacSparky readers have let me know that they do too. Get your time back and try SaneBox today.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by TextExpander from Smile. In our fast-paced world, things change constantly — and errors in messaging often have significant consequences.

TextExpander lets you make new approved messaging available to every team member instantly with just a few keystrokes, ensuring your team remains consistent, current, and accurate.

Get your message right every time: expand the content that corrects your spelling and keeps your language consistent with just a few keystrokes.

Your team members will consistently know the right message for the right person at the right time, without relying on memory or copy and paste.

I pay for a team account with TextExpander for my assistant and me. We both make changes to the critical snippets as needed, and we both benefit from that work. The more people you’ve got writing on your team, the more useful this gets.

You can get 20% off your first year. Just head over to TextExpander from Smile and sign up.

Daylite is MacSparky’s sponsor this week. It’s the Mac CRM that takes your business further. Daylite helps you nurture relationships, complete your projects, close more deals, and grow your business—all in one place, even when you are working offline.

Unlike other Web-based CRMs that focus on customer relationships and sales, Daylite takes you through the full customer lifecycle. From meeting a new prospect and following up until you close the deal all the way, through executing the project plans and maintaining customer relationships for repeat business—it’s all organized in one place and shared with your team.

Daylite is built exclusively for Mac, iPhone, and iPad so not only is it compatible with Big Sur and M1-powered Macs, it’s designed to work seamlessly with all of the Apple features you love:

• Integrate with Apple Mail on Mac

• Share your Apple Contacts and iCal

• Leverage features like Siri and Caller ID on your iPhone

• FaceID and TouchID support

• Support its own light/dark mode

Daylite offers complimentary onboarding support to help new customers with the set-up process and guide you through the best onboarding path that is focused on your business needs. Ready to take your business further? Start your free 30-day Daylite trial today!

A lot of folks know that DEVONthink, this week’s MacSparky sponsor, excels at bringing artificial intelligence to your documents and research, but did you also know DEVONthink has a killer set of automation tools? Over the last few years, DEVONthink has added some powerful features that make automating your DEVONthink library a snap.

• The app can install scripts in Apple Mail to save email messages to your DEVONthink library with link backs to Apple Mail.

• You can build smart folders that automatically collect documents around parameters you (or the DEVONthink A. I.) sets.

• There is now built-in document automation called Smart Rules that lets you move, sort, rename, tag, index, and perform just about any other action in the DEVONthink arsenal automatically. The below screenshot shows a list of available triggers to give you an idea. This is a relatively new feature that a lot of experienced DEVONthink users don’t even realize exists.

• You can build template documents and generate them right out of DEVONthink.

• The mobile version, DEVONthink To Go, supports Shortcuts and mobile automation.

I always appreciate it when developers spend time trying to take the tedium out of their apps, and the DEVONthink developers have delivered on this over the past few years in a big way. If you haven’t checked out DEVONthink yet (or looked at it lately), you should.

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.

Interested? MacSparky readers can get a 20% discount on DEVONthink. Use the code MACSPARKY2021 at checkout. This offer has been extended and now ends on December 31, 2021.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Timing. Timing is an automatic time- tracking app. It lets you see where your time spent without having to lift a finger.

So why should you track your time? One reason may be for your job. Maybe you charge clients by your time or need to report to your boss where you spend your time. But there are a lot more reasons to track your time. Tracking your time gives you a realistic picture of where you are spending (and wasting) your time. With good time-tracking data, you can make better decisions about where to make commitments, where to delegate, and realistically see how you’re doing.

Timing scratches all of these itches. With Timing, you instantly see how you are spending your time. It helps you work more productively and make smarter decisions about how to spend your time in the future.

We all know that tracking your time is key to being productive, but it’s hard to track your time if you’re doing a bunch of different things at once or don’t have the right tools.

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 spent on each task. Timing also now has a useful teams feature, letting you share project and time entries in a privacy-friendly fashion. This gives you valuable team data without being creepy.

I run Timing on my Mac every day, and you should too. I even made some screencasts on how I use Timing. Download the free 14-day trial today and get 10% off for the first year!

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Yoink (Website) (for Mac) (for iOS). Dragging and dropping files from one place to another is a common task, but it’s not that easy.

You have to click on the file you want to move, drag it over the destination of your choice and drop it there. This can be done if you’re lucky enough to land in just the right spot and you have just the right windows open next to each other. You also have to do this while looking at your monitor, which means that every time you are dragging something around, you are distracted from what else might be happening in front of your eyes. Moving files shouldn’t feel like defusing a bomb.

Yoink allows users to easily drag & drop items, getting files exactly where they belong, and without you having to have everything set “just right” in advance. They have a version for Mac, iPhone, and iPad and I use it daily. Everybody needs a shelf. Make your technology shelf Yoink.

There are several reasons I chose Yoink over its competitors. First, I like the design. It looks nice but also gets out of the way when I’m not using it. Second, Yoink has been around a while and it has both stability and a rich set of features. If you need a shelf app that won’t let you down, get Yoink.

Yoink’s developer also has two other useful apps, ScreenFloat (a screenshot utility) and Transloader (a download utility). You can get a bundle with all three apps in the App Store.

This week MacSparky.com is sponsored by TextExpander, the easiest way to start automating your work on Mac, iPad, and iPhone. TextExpander is a text replacement tool. With it, you can type a phrase like “ccell” and it will automatically fill in your cell phone number. But TextExpander is so much more than that.

Using TextExpander, you can have it automatically create the date and time. For example, when I talk with someone on the phone related to the day job and want to keep notes about the conversation, I just type “xdts” which, in my head, means date and time string. Then TextExpander automatically creates something like this, “2021-03-06 09:14”. If I need to put the full date in a letter, I just type “fdate” and TextExpander puts in the current date, like this, “March 6, 2021”.

But TextExpander can still go deeper. It can use the contents of your clipboard to auto-fill in snippets. It can press keyboard keys, like the tab key, to automate filling in forms on the web or creating an email. You can get it for yourself and your team members so you can share snippets with your team members. I pay for a team account and we use it from MacSparky headquarters to handle Field Guide customer support email. We can make changes to shared snippets and everyone gets updated.

To learn more, head over to TextExpander.com and let them know you heard about it at MacSparky in the “Where did you hear about us” field.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Daylite, a native CRM and project management app built specifically for Apple lovers. Unlike other Web-based CRMs that just focus on customer relationships and sales, Daylite takes you through the full customer lifecycle. From meeting prospects & winning business, to managing the moving pieces on projects, all the way through following up for referrals and repeat business. It’s all done in Daylite, even when you are working offline.

Compatible with Big Sur and M1-powered Macs, Daylite is designed to work seamlessly with all the Apple features you love:

• Integrate with Apple Mail on Mac

• Share your Apple Contacts and iCal

• Leverage features like Siri & Caller ID on your iPhone

• FaceID and TouchID support

• Support its own light/dark mode

Daylite offers complimentary onboarding support to help new customers with the set-up process and guide you through the best onboarding path that is focused on your business needs. Ready to take your business further? Start your free 30-day Daylite trial today!