Let’s say you’re reading an online article or an ebook in any desktop application… and you want to grab a highlighted portion of text > paste it to WorkFlowy > and continue reading where you left off. You can do this with just 1 keyboard shortcut…
Reading in your browser
In the below GIF all I do is (1) highlight the text I want and (2) hit Alt+2. This copies my highlighted text, jumps to my WorkFlowy tab, pastes my snippet and jumps back to the tab I was in.
Reading in an application
If I’m in any other application (Icecream Ebook Reader, Adobe Acrobat, etc.), all I do is highlight the text I want and hit Alt+1. This copies my text, jumps to my browser, pastes my snippet into my WorkFlowy outline and jumps back to the application I was in to continue reading. Look mum, no hands!
What’s in a keyboard shortcut?
It’s all about hitting one teeny keyboard shortcut to automate what would normally require a bunch of clicking between different browser tabs and/or applications – when popping snippets of your reading into WorkFlowy in a run-on fashion. Basically, way less fuss.
What you see in the GIF’s above is a 1-second pause after pasting to WorkFlowy… because I’ve set it up that way. Otherwise the process is so fast that you wouldn’t be able to tell that anything had been done… unless you went along to your WorkFlowy outline.
How do I set this up?
- Install a free text expansion app called PhraseExpress (Mac & Windows).
- Download one or more of the .pxp files I made for you and choose your own keyboard shortcut(s). All of that is accessible and explained in this shared WorkFlowy list.
Got any “simpler” tips?
The above process is already quite simple. It’s a quick, one-time setup… But if you’d like a two-second tip:
- If you’re reading from a PDF, you can drag that directly into your browser like so (to keep what you’re reading close to WorkFlowy):
- If you’ve got .epub (iBooks) or .mobi (Kindle) files, there are several good browser extensions/ add-ons and sites that will allow you to load these in your browser.
I hope this post stimulates you to find ways to get stuff into WorkFlowy quicker, all the while focusing more on what you’re reading 🙂