ScreenZen puts a countdown between the impulse and the app, and it is free on iPhone, Android, Windows and Mac

Pin it once, paste it forever Android Police's Parth Shah leaves the stock keyboard behind in four passes: advanced voice typing goes on first, which punctuates dictation on its own and takes spoken commands for emoji and editing on a Pixel 6 or newer; then the clipboard icon, where the text you type constantly gets pinned, an address, a stock email reply, contact details, so forms stop costing the same keystrokes twice; then Gboard settings, then Dictionary, then Languages, where the personal dictionary is fed the local words, names, slang and work terms autocorrect keeps mangling, each with a shortcut so a few letters expand into the whole phrase; and last, saving recent screenshots to the clipboard, so a screenshot goes out from inside the keyboard without a trip to Photos. The write-up is clear that advanced voice typing needs a Pixel 6 or later, and that Rambler, the Gemini-powered voice feature coming to the Pixel 11 series, is untested so far.

Press the backtick, read the logic How-To Geek's Steve Larner stops clicking cell by cell to work out what a workbook is doing: Ctrl and the backtick key toggles the whole sheet from results to formulas, so the arithmetic, the functions, the cell references and the lookups reaching into other tabs and other workbooks are all visible at once, and the same keystroke puts the results back; from there Ctrl and Backspace returns you to the formula cell you wandered away from, Alt then W then N opens a duplicate window so two parts of the same sheet sit side by side, and Ctrl and G jumps to a cell a formula depends on. The limit named in the piece is the long formula that gets cut off at the column edge: Alt then H then O then I widens the columns to show it, but nothing can be edited until you undo that with Ctrl and Z first.

Write the standing order once How-To Geek's Vishwamoorthy Ramakrishnan uses Gemini Spark, Google's personal-agent feature, to run five recurring jobs against Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Keep and Tasks instead of doing them by hand: a weekday morning brief that puts the day's schedule, the local weather and the genuinely urgent email in one place; a daily learning and habit log that takes a voice note and appends it, dated and bulleted, to a Google Doc you create first and call Daily Learnings Tracker; a weekly Gmail sweep for renewals, expiring trials and price increases that lands in a Sheet called Sub Tracker and flags anything billing within 48 hours; a Thursday 6:00 PM watchlist of new releases across Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Max and Apple TV+ with ratings and summaries; and a travel consolidator that pulls flight and hotel confirmations out of the inbox into a Trip Master Itinerary doc. Read the cost before you plan on it, because Spark is still in beta and limited to Google AI Pro at $19.99 a month or AI Ultra at $99.99 a month (free to college students for 12 months), and the write-up notes the execution can be a little slow at times.