How Raycast Changed My Wrokflow and Mindset
I have never been a fan of Spotlight and keyboard-only workflows but one application changed completely the way I’m doing things right now.
A couple of weeks ago my attention was captured by some material Raycast AI . I was interested and installed the app on my mac. My first impression was that it could do so many things out of the box even without AI and Pro plan. I started to press Cmd-Space shortcut more often. I configured it a lot for myself.
At some point, a spirit of a junior developer came to me and said: “Let’s do as much as possible with Raycast!”. Isn’t it familiar? Sounds like, “Let’s create an OS in Brainfuck!”
Later I switched from just installing and configuring stuff to workflow-oriented approach. I reintroduced mindfulness to my daily routine.
I started to question:
- What am I doing too often?
- How do I do it?
- Is there a way to automate it or make the way I’m doing it more productive?
- What simple actions could help?
I’m still following this endless path but I’ve already achieved a couple of milestones along the way.
What Changed?
I mostly cleared the hell of browser tabs moving most of the commonly used pages to Browser bookmarks or Raycast’s quick links.
I cleared a chaos of always open applications and files by adding them to quick links or even adding scripts for automation.
I added a sound notification after each command finishes, like espeak "Finished $(basename ${PWD})" to my .zshrc. It allows me to work on other tasks while time-consuming compilations or tests are running.
I’m in progress of changing the settings of iterm, tmux and other stuff in order to make the titles of windows, tabs and panes more informative.
I updated my email folders and filters to be aligned with current subscriptions. Now I can check only several important emails a day and read mail lists when I have time and need them.
I created, but still haven’t published Raycast extension to manage Publora. You can review it on my GitHub for now. It helps me to be more present in social media since I’m not a fan of them.
I started to use AI through Raycast and GH Copilot intensively. Before that I just played a bit with it. Now I try to use it instead of Googling and for writing or fixing simple code, tests and docs. I don’t completely rely AI but it’s good as an advanced autocompletion and snippet tool.
Conclusion
As you can see, not all of the changes are related to Raycast itself, but it was a trigger for these changes. I’m going to describe some of them in the following articles. The process is going on…