Your job, like most, involves repetition. If you’re typing the same words over and over, you’re wasting hours of your life. You won't notice it because the waste happens in very small increments of seconds. Added up, it's an enormous amount of time.
Products like TextExpander turn otherwise mundane and repetitive typing into an absolute joy. And they can do way more than just expand snippets of text.
Of course you can use it for commonly used phrases. But you can also do madlib-style “fill in the blank” or “choose from a list” type of varied “snippets” so that your notes are more conversational and appropriate based on context.
Here are 4 ways where you can use TextExpander every single day in your work:
Recruiting: the number of warm, cold or other kinds of introductions you’ll make on services like LinkedIn likely include a ton of repetitive phrases, such as info about a position, or about the company, or what it is about the candidate that is of interest to you. Using a well formed Snippet you can customize these and send notes out ten times faster than doing them manually.
Customer service: If you poll or otherwise query your customers to see if they are pleased, build a snippet that customizes the text based on type of encounter (phone support, in-person, remote), or includes specifics about who helped the customer, or the type of work done.
New business / marketing: instead of building 10 different types of introductory notes, build ONE with a variety of options. Your snippet can include OPTIONAL sections (maybe you use different text for an educational or non-profit group), and can use different types of summaries of your business (short/medium/long) or different customer examples. Pick a relevant customer example based on the category of the prospect (e.g. “We do work with the following banks: ____”)
Managing: using DATE MATH in your snippets, you can have text reference dates in the future that are RELATIVE to the current date. So if you want to have a “let’s have a follow up meeting on ______ (date) and have it be two weeks from today, the snippet can calculate the date and insert it into the message. Very handy. This is also a clever technique for letting people know you’re completely backlogged on email and will get back to them in 7 days. It puts in the date automatically. Combine this with a tool like Boomerang and you can really take control back of your inbox.
If you aren’t using some kind of TextExpander, why not?
Here are some more articles on how amazing this product is, and why every information worker probably should use some form of snippet expansion when communicating with others.