In this article, I’m going to share some of the productivity hacks that save time in my day-to-day activities as a product manager. Hope you’ll find it useful.

Here is what I will cover in this article:

Creating and editing images like interface mockups and screenshots
Editing text faster with hotkeys and special symbols
Using a clipboard manager to save hours a day
Building interface mockups to illustrate ideas quickly
Other useful apps and macOS settings
Top 3 ChatGPT plugin use cases

Creating and Editing Images

As a product manager, you will often find yourself having to support your communication with visuals like screenshots, roadmaps and mockups.

Screenshot Hotkeys

Here are the standard screenshot hotkeys in macOS.

My personal favourite is Copy picture of selected area to the clipboard since it doesn’t pollute your desktop with infinite files.

After activating this screenshot mode with ^ + ⇧ + ⌘ + 4, you can take a full window screenshot by pressing the Spacebar. Since hitting four keys at once is hardly perfect, you can assign your own keystroke combos.

The mouse pointer will switch to a camera icon 📷 and let you grab the full window - just like in the example above.

Fast Image Annotation

Sometimes taking screenshots is not enough — you need to draw attention to some part of the image, add text, or both. On macOS, you can use the standard Preview app to annotate screenshots. Open a screenshot or paste one from your clipboard (by opening the Preview app and pressing ⌘ + N).

Then you can start adding elements to your screenshots:

⌘ + ^ + T to add a Text block for comments;
⌘ + ^ + A to add an Arrow;
⌘ + ^ + O and ⌘ + ^ + R to add an Oval or a Rectangle.

Editing Text Faster

Be it in Slack, Figma, Google Workspace or plain old email, you are required to work with texts, so incorporating hotkeys into your text workflow will speed things up.

Here are the ones that I use the most:

⌘ + left arrow or right arrow will move the cursor to the beginning or the end of the line respectively;
⌥ + left arrow or right arrow will move the cursor word by word;
Use the Delete key with the hotkeys from above to delete full words or lines in one keystroke;
To select parts of the text, use the same hotkeys and hold down Shift.

Now that you can quickly navigate through text, here are some quick actions that work in most apps:

⌘ + B marks the selection in bold;
⌘ + U underlines the selection;
⌘ + I italicises the selection;
⌘ + K turns the highlighted text into a clickable link;
⌘ + ⌥ + ⇧ + V is particularly useful in Google Workspace: it inserts the clipboard text and inherits the target formatting, and comes in handy when you copy from a document with one text font to a document with a different font.

Ever wanted to insert emojis directly into text? The ⌘ + ^ + Space combo opens the macOS emoji and special character picker.

These are some basic clipboard tricks. But if you’re looking for something truly special to boost your clipboard productivity, look no further than the Paste app.

Using the Paste Clipboard Manager

Your clipboard only remembers the last item you copied by default, which is particularly annoying when you need to frequently copy and paste, like when writing an article about hotkeys and keeping special characters at hand.

When you copy something new, the previously copied item vanishes and makes way for the new item. To get it back, you need to find it and press ⌘ + C once again.

This is when the Paste app comes in handy — it stores all the things you copied in a visual interface so that you can select what exactly you need to copy right now.

There are plenty of other clipboard managers for both macOS and Windows, like Ditto and CopyLess. I prefer Paste because of its visual interface and cross-platform capabilities.

Building Interface Mockups

When talking to engineers or sharing design ideas with the team, it's important to illustrate ideas with visuals.

Figma

Even if your design team is not using Figma or you don’t have edit access to any of the design projects, I strongly recommend installing the Figma desktop app and checking its beginner tutorials to familiarise yourself with the key concepts and elements.

This way, you can create your own space to jiggle with wireframes (e.g. to see if certain text fits on a single line).

If you are up for more digging or need a feature explained, Figma has an amazing community where you can explore projects that others have published (like an e-commerce mobile app) or basic UI elements and states (e.g. iOS system alerts).

Finally, with the Figma mobile mirror mode, you can test how a design feels on a real device:

Log in to your Figma account on a mobile device;
On the laptop, select a frame that you want to test, and it will automatically appear on your mobile device’s screen;
Voila! The controls will remain static, but scrolling will work and you’ll be able to see how the design looks on a mobile phone.

Balsamiq

If you don’t need pixel-perfect interfaces but rather a low-fidelity sketch, I recommend checking out Balsamiq, available on the desktop and in the browser. For me, it came in handy while creating single-page interface mockups from scratch (like feature configuration pages).

Other Productivity Tips and Apps

Gifski for converting videos to GIFs. It works fast, has a clean interface, and comes in handy when inserting screen recordings into Google Slides.
Workflowy is a simple, yet powerful to-do list that can be infinitely nested and zoomed in and out. I use it for tracking my personal tasks during the week. It works across platforms with blazing speed.
Rectangle can move and resize apps and browser windows with hotkeys. It is extremely powerful (e.g. you force an app to take up 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, or 1/6 of the screen), and can be overkill for some, but even using 2 or 3 simple hotkeys helps me arrange my screen for multitasking quickly
I use Pocket as a backlog of articles and documents to read. When it syncs on your phone, it downloads all the pages’ contents, which is incredibly useful when you’re commuting by metro or flying with no internet access.
Bookmarks Cards is the most lightweight browser extension that visualises all your bookmarks for easy navigation.

ChatGPT Plus Use Cases

The free version of ChatGPT needs no introduction already, but here are my top 3 use cases for the Plus version that you may not be aware of:

Retrieving industry benchmarks

The ChatGPT browsing plugin does a lot of work for me: it provides a concise summary of what it was able to retrieve with references that you can open and double-check in case it is hallucinating. Without this feature, I would look up, for instance, the average CTR of a Facebook e-commerce banner in the US, then go through dozens of SEO-optimised pages written by ad platform startups and see that their contents are largely the same.

Creating sequence diagrams

With the Show Me plugin, whatever ChatGPT can output as text can now be converted into a diagram, and pre-generated diagrams can be edited either by asking ChatGPT or by hand (you can go directly to the Show Me website and edit).

Retrieving documentation

When I’m using SQL, Amplitude, Looker or any other day-to-day analytical tools, ChatGPT with a browser plugin can explain how to use certain functions of these tools. Unlike reading the documentation yourself, you can now get answers exactly the way that you phrased your question. Furthermore, it provides relevant auto-generated examples so that you can see precisely what to do.

Thank you for sticking around! I hope you will find some of these productivity tips and tricks useful in your line of work.

Let me know which ones you liked the most, and what topics you’d like to hear more about. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out here.

Productivity Hacks for Busy Product Managers: Useful Apps and Hotkeys