LEVEL UP
David Sparks’ 7 Essential Shortcuts
David Sparks—or MacSparky to his many fans—is a technology writer, podcaster, online-course teacher, YouTube host, father, and, until very recently, lawyer.
When you have a résumé that long, efficiency is key. Which is why Sparks welcomed Shortcuts coming to Mac: By letting macOS handle repetitive tasks, he can focus on being creative and productive.
We asked the productivity and automation rock star to share some of the shortcuts that help him make quick work of his busy days.
Pro tip: For quicker access to a shortcut, add it to the Finder’s Quick Actions menu, your menu bar, or the Touch Bar. To do so, open the shortcut in the Shortcuts app, click the Shortcut Details button (which looks like three control sliders), and check the appropriate boxes.
Set up a split screen
For Sparks, there may be no better Mac shortcut than this simple but mighty action that takes a pair of apps and splits the screen between them—pair it with a keyboard shortcut and you can trigger your window layout with a keystroke. “I call these setups,” says Sparks. “When a particular window setup kicks in, it not only makes the task easier but triggers my brain to focus on the task I’ve just, well, set up.”
Sparks has preconfigured the shortcut with four app pairings—Fantastical and Craft, Mail and Notes, OmniFocus and Notes, and Mail and Safari—but it’s easy to add your own.
Lock into writing mode
When it’s time to write, Sparks uses his Start Writing shortcut to get in the right frame of mind. “First it kicks off my Work Focus mode, which allows only an approved list of people and apps to interrupt me,” he says. “Then it splits the screen between my favorite writing app and Safari, where I do my research.” For a final flourish, it launches the Thunderstorm sound in Dark Noise. Writing mode, on.
On first run, the shortcut prompts you to pick your favorite writing app and add your preferred sites for web research. Pro tip: If you time-track, add an action to run a Timery timer.
Schedule a meeting from anywhere
No matter how much, um, practice we’ve had in scheduling meetings over the past few years, it’s still a hassle. This handy shortcut automates some of that process by prompting you for an event’s name, participants, date, and time, then shows you a summary; click Add to create the event. “The whole process takes just a minute,” says Sparks. And anything that saves time planning meetings is good news to us.
Take a break
When it comes to focus, productivity experts are just like us: “My ability to concentrate falls apart after a few hours of deep work,” says Sparks. So he regularly takes breaks to recharge, whether it’s to weed the garden or browse YouTube.
The only problem: remembering to start working again! “This shortcut prompts me for a break timer,” he says. “The default is 15 minutes. When the timer is up, the shortcut puts up an alert telling me to get back to work.”
Swap your calendar views
Sparks relies on the Editors’ Choice app Fantastical for most of his calendaring needs, and the app’s Quarter view is especially handy for plotting out his upcoming months. He uses this view alongside the app’s calendar-set feature, which lets him see a subset of his calendars.
This shortcut quickly gets him into planning mode: It chooses his “Planning” calendar set, then switches to Quarter view, and finally brings Fantastical to the front if it wasn’t already. (You can edit the shortcut to use any view and calendar set; duplicate the shortcut to set up different configurations.)
Block off meeting-prep time
One of Sparks’ productivity secrets is that getting ready for a meeting is sometimes as important as attending it. “I find that if I spend 30 minutes preparing for meetings, I get a lot more out of them.”
The fix is this genius shortcut: “It looks at the next five days of events in my work calendar and prompts me to pick those that need prep time,” he says. “It then adds a 30-minute block just before each.”
Listen to your Clipboard
For Sparks, writing isn’t a problem—but proofreading can be. “I’ll miss errors because my brain knows what I meant to write, and that makes me ignore what my eyes see,” he says.
To get around that, he created a simple shortcut that reads the content of his Clipboard aloud. Just copy the desired text and run the shortcut to do your “proof-listening.” “My ears are more discriminating,” he says. “It’s remarkable the number of mistakes I’ve caught this way.”