that I follow for any kind of work that I'm doing.

And it's this.

If I find myself doing something repeatedly,

there is a process I have to follow all the time

over and over again,

then anything I can do to make that process more efficient

either by making it faster,

removing steps or automating steps, I should do.

And with that idea in mind that today,

I would like to share with you

my top 10 favorite productivity apps,

specifically for Windows.

Now I've got a couple of friends

who have done these kind of app roundup lists for the Mac.

And I do use Mac OS.

I use a lot of those apps,

but I actually use Windows more often.

I prefer on the desktop platforms

and I haven't seen a whole lot of these videos

for us Windows folk.

So today I'm gonna be breaking down my top 10,

including the one that I think is

probably gonna be the most interesting for you.

My surprise pick, one that you're probably not

expecting, a pair that work insanely well together.

They're the ones that I'm most excited to share

with you in this video.

And finally, the one that is objectively

the most useful app on this list.

One other great thing about this list is

that every app on it is actually free.

So let's get into this list,

starting with the one that I think

you might find most interesting

which is an app called Sharex.

Sharex is a screenshot tool for Windows.

It's free, it's open source.

And I use the heck out of it

because I take a ton of screenshots in my work

and I do this for multiple different purposes.

I do it for content creation.

If you've seen any of my written

Notion tutorial over on my website

you've probably seen my screenshots and animated GIFs

but I also use it to communicate more efficiently

with my team.

For instance, the other day

my personal website had a bug on it

and I was able to just take screenshots

of the bug and send them in Slack to my developer, Martin,

to show him exactly what was going on.

It's a lot more efficient than trying to type

up a long description, but Sharex has a trick up

its sleeve that a lot of other screenshot apps do not have

which is optical character recognition.

You can actually take a screenshot

of some text within a picture or YouTube video

and it will pull that text

out and put it right on your clipboard.

So you can then paste it into your note taking application.

Now I should mention that there is a builtin screenshot tool

within Windows called Snip and Sketch

and it's honestly very capable.

You can use it

by hitting Windows, Key, shift S.

You can take screenshots

put 'em on your clipboard, draw on them.

But the editor that comes

within Sharex is just vastly more powerful

and lets you do things like adding boxes, drawing arrows

adding pixelation and blurring for sensitive info.

It's just overall a lot better.

And that's why I personally like using it

over Snip and Sketch.

Now there are a couple of little tweaks

that I add to share X to make it a little bit better.

First I add multiple hot keys for different jobs.

So I like to use control shift F to add a screenshot

directly to my clipboard

or control shift C to open up the editor

so I can make boxes or arrows or what have you.

And then I use control shift alt C

if I want to use the optical character recognition

and pull text out of an image.

And I also configure my default screenshots

to live inside of Google drive.

So all my screenshots are available

to me across all my different devices.

App number two on this list is called Quick Look.

And if you've ever used Mac OS you probably

know there is a function built

into the operating system called Quick Look

which is sadly absent on Windows.

Well, this app brings it in there.

Now in Mac OS

Quick Look is a function in finder

where you can basically click

on a file without opening it

and see information about that file in the sidebar.

You can see an image preview,

if it's an image, you can see text inside of a text file.

And the Quick Look app inside

the Microsoft Windows store adds this to Windows.

You can click on a file and without opening it

you can just hit the space bar to preview it.

Now, this is less useful for really simple file types

like images or text because notepad

and the Windows photo viewer open pretty quickly

but this also works on Photoshop files.

So I can preview Photoshop files

in a very big window without open up Photoshop.

I can open up animated GIFs or videos

and preview them without launching a dedicated app for it.

So overall really useful tool.

And I love that it has a button that'll let me

make the preview stay on top of other windows,

as I sometimes want to say, take a screenshot

and make sure it floats on top of something else,

just so I can reference it.

App number three on this list

and you probably saw this coming, is Notion.

I can't make this list complete

without Notion because I use it every single day.

And there is in fact desktop app.

So I can use it directly on Windows

which means I'm not breaking the rules of this list.

Now I do have a confession to make,

which is that I think that Mac OS has a greater number

of top tier note-taking applications than Windows does.

It has Ulysses, it has Bear

and has Apple Notes, which is frankly fantastic.

But at this point, notion has made enough improvements both

in its speed and in fixing some

of the annoyances I used to have with it

that it is now my favorite note taking application,

in particular, just recently,

they fixed the bug where you couldn't select text precisely

across blocks, which was actually kind of a bug

in pretty much all based text editors.

I think Whimsical was the first one to really fix it

at least that I noticed, but now Notion has done as well

which means that I can select text

like I could in a regular word processor like Google docs.

And that means I can write

and I can edit precisely inside of Notion

and Notion runs a lot more than just my note taking.

In fact, I run my entire content

creation process inside of Notion.

We capture ideas there, we run the entire content pipeline

in there from research, to scripting to editing.

And we even have a library of all of our past videos

so we can pull information from them when we need it.

That system is called Creators Companion.

I've actually turned it into a template

and you can check it out over@thomasjfrank.com/cc.

And for personal productivity,

I like to manage my tasks in notion.

I have a full template for that.

I do my note taking in Notion,

but what I've really wanted ever

since I discovered this app is a full

on second brain template.

Something would marry tasks and projects and notes

and goals and have them all work in harmony.

I've been kicking around with this design

in my head for a very long time.

It's very tough to get right

to get the UX to be easily usable,

so it won't turn into a mess later on

but I think I'm just about done designing this template.

And I've got a second channel called Thomas Frank explains.

It's all about Notion build guides and tutorials.

So if you are interested

in that kind of thing, check that channel out.

I'll have it link the description down below

and let's move on to our fourth app in this list

which actually takes our award

for the most surprising app on the list.

And it's actually Microsoft Edge.

The browser that comes built into Windows.

Yes, I have had Microsoft popping up little things

telling me to switch over from Chrome to edge for years now

but I've always ignored it until I looked

up some stats and found out

that Edge is actually a faster browser than Chrome.

And I was getting kind of tired of Chrome

just hogging up tons of resources on my system.

So I decided to give Edge a try.

And what do you know?

It's actually kind of great.

At this point, it's built on top of Chromium

which is the engine that Chrome is built on.

So it's very familiar.

All the keyboard shortcuts are the same and crucially

you can install extensions

from the Chrome Web store into Edge.

Pretty much any extension that works inside

of Chrome now works in Edge,

which means that I'm not losing anything

by making the switch.

And I'm gaining quite a few things.

Number one, Edge does feel snappier and it feels

like it takes up less resources than Chrome does.

There's even a built in feature that will put tabs to sleep

after two hours by default, if you're not using them

which frees up system resources even more.

But maybe my favorite feature on Edge

is if you go up to your tab bar and right click

you can turn on vertical tabs,

which will move your tabs from being a horizontal list

across the top of the bar to a vertical list on the side,

which means that even if you are a tab hoarder like I am,

you can still see the names

of all your tabs, which you cannot do in Chrome

without a third party extension.

App number five on the list

is actually one that is built

right into Windows and it's the Windows Clipboard Manager.

So if you've ever used a clipboard before

if you've ever copied and pasted

you probably know that the clipboard is one

of the most useful functions in any operating system.

But by default, it has one major limitation.

It only remembers the last thing you copied.

It's a lot more useful

if you have clipboard history turned on

so you can see everything you've copied

and you can go back and paste something old.

And that is exactly what the clipboard history feature does.

So if you wanna turn it on

all you gotta do is hit Windows key V.

It will ask you if you wanna turn it on,

and then you can even sync your clipboard history

across devices, if you want to.

I don't do that because I put passwords on my

clipboard and I don't really like the idea

of having it transmitted across anything

that isn't into my Password Manager

but it is an option if you want to use it.

And that brings us to one

of two apps that I am personally most excited to share

with you in this video.

These two apps work really well as a pair.

So that first app is called Flow Launcher.

And all Flow Launcher does is bring up a small text window

on your computer when you hit a key command

by default alt space.