All Blog Posts – Shayon Pal

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November 1, 2020

Working from Home means you have to fight the tyranny of the urgent

This Friday, I had woken up with a lot of enthusiasm because it was comparatively a leisure day and I had a bunch of things planned to do. I was planning to write a blog post, draft a work proposal, work on a mobile app redesign, and also redo some of the CSS of this website. All were important, strategic projects to help boost my freelancing business. The day passed, and I was productive. But not with all of those important projects. Instead, I got sucked into a 3-hour long phone call with one of my clients and updating the...

Automation, Alfred

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October 28, 2020

Count the number of words using Alfred Workflow on macOS

Many a time, when I write for publications, I need to constantly limit myself to a certain number of words. I also need to keep a track of the same while designing websites, or copyediting someone else's articles. I know that there are apps like Ulysses and Draft that monitor the same, but it becomes a hassle to copy and paste text when I am working on other applications. To mitigate that constant irritation, I decided to write an Alfred workflow and automate this task. I've bound the workflow to the keyboard shortcut cmd+ctrl+B. The moment the workflow is triggered,...

Siri Shortcuts, Automation

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October 28, 2020

Integrate Siri Shortcuts with Notion note-taking app

Notion has recently gotten a lot of spotlight within the productivity community as a prominent note-taking application, and a worthy alternative to the age-old Evernote. It is a great tool to build wikis about everything in one's life. There have also been instances where people have used the tool as full-fledged project managers or calendars for themselves. Despite, all the great reviews about the app, there are surely some shortcomings. One of the biggest, for my personal workflows, is the absence of support of Siri Shortcuts on the iOS apps. I use Siri Shortcuts to automate many aspects of my...

Productivity

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October 27, 2020

10 Best Productivity Apps for macOS

I like using applications that end up quickening my workflows and make it more efficient. That is one of the main reasons why I am part of at least 15 iOS and 5 macOS apps' beta testers' list. Also, being a Product Manager myself, I like reaching out to developers with my feedback and get an amazing rush when they decided to implement the suggested changes. This has led me to build great connections with many developers and also test out many apps before shortlisting the ones I actually end up using in my daily life. I have a few...

Product Management

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October 21, 2020

Product Analytics can help improve your E-commerce Conversion Funnel

E-commerce companies usually measure their success in terms of their revenue goals. However, the revenue helps just the company. For a company to be successful and always be on top of their target audience's mind, it is imperative to close the loop and think about the complete decision making, buying, and post-purchase experiences. Traditionally, an e-commerce funnel refers to how many users enter the funnel by landing up on the website/app via-à-vis how many end up reaching the bottom of the funnel by successfully making a purchase. In reality, the user journey is a bit more complicated. Some customers land...

Alfred, Automation, Productivity

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October 19, 2020

7 useful automation ideas for Alfred App on macOS

Alfred app on macOS has been my companion for half a decade now. I am such a fan that I ended up buying their Lifetime plan, instead of the usual yearly one. If you work on macOS, this is one application I'd recommend over anything else. I love the application for one major reason — Automation. There are a lot of actions I perform regularly on the computer, that can be easily automated with Alfred. A couple of minutes saved here and there can easily result into saving days every year. Today, I thought I'd share a few automation ideas...

Siri Shortcuts, Automation, Productivity

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October 18, 2020

Using Siri Shortcuts & IFTTT to automate & manage my coffee consumption

I love coffee. The best way I like to brew my coffee is French Press. Every morning, the very first ritual after brushing my teeth is to get started on the coffee. For the brand of coffee I use, the ideal times I like to brew my coffee for is 4 minutes. Additionally, recently, I also decided to start tracking how much coffee I consume in a day. To be able to achieve the same, the tools that I end up using are: The Apple Watch - primarily because I end up having that gadget on me a lot more...

WordPress, Development

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October 17, 2020

Backup or Migrate a WordPress Website using Duplicator

In my last post, I wrote about the 5 plugins that are used the most in the community to backup and restore WordPress websites. Out of the 5, I'd mentioned that my choice of backup tool was Duplicator Pro. Today, let's take a deeper dive into it and understand how can Duplicator Pro be used to achieve that. By the way, there is also a free version of the plugin that is perfectly usable. The extra features you get out of the Pro are: Save the backups on external storage, like AWS, Google Drive and Dropbox. As I'd mentioned in...

WordPress, Development

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October 15, 2020

Plugins to backup WordPress websites and restore them hassle-free

I started dabbling with WordPress after a long time, recently. It is a great content management system that helps a relatively non-technical user to publish a website/blog fairly quickly. The fact that WordPress is open-source, freely available, and is supported by a very rich ecosystem of free and paid plugins adds to that appeal. Heck, even this website is built on WordPress, after 1 week of effort. What is the best way to continue developing a website? Should it be done on localhost, on a staging server, or directly on the live website? Developing on the live production server is...

Productivity

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February 28, 2018

My Idea of an Ideal E-mail Client

It’s been over 2 decades that I have been using e-mails. I have moved from service providers like 37.com, netaddress.com, usa.net, to more respectable ones like Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail. Truth be told, once I landed on Gmail, back in 2004, I never wanted to move out of it. Note, I mentioned Gmail as a “service”, and not the client. I’ll elaborate in a bit.

Lifestyle

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February 15, 2018

The Big Switch – 1 month of the “iPad Lifestyle”

Last month, I wrote about how I plan to start using my iPad Pro exclusively while I travel, and leave the MacBook back at my desk. Well, at least I’ve managed to follow that pretty religiously. Thanks to mostly living on the cloud, I have managed to segregate my devices depending upon where I am. In this blog post, I tried to outline how does a iPad-first lifestyle fit into my workflow. Does it succeed in achieving the dream, or fail miserably?

Productivity, Lifestyle

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January 17, 2018

Can the iPad Pro replace the Laptop in everyday life?

I like tech products that are light, easy to carry, and with long lasting batteries. It is because of my affinity towards nifty gadgets that I had decided to replace my original MacBook Air with the new 2016 MacBook. Yes, not a Pro, not another Air, but just the MacBook. Some time back, I switched to the iPad Pro bandwagon too. First the 9.7-inch one, and then the 2nd generation 12.9-inch one. Complete with the Smart Keyboard and the Apple Pencil. Why? Because I strove to lead the hippie lifestyle. Because I was convinced that I could replace my laptop...