Productivity

ScreencastsONLINE just continues to pay dividends for me in my Apple-device-filled life. In this case, it was a brand new tutorial for a utility that I have known about for a long time: PopClip.

PopClip is a Mac utility that adds a floating action menu whenever you select text, making common actions like copy, paste, search, and share faster. It’s especially useful if you work with text a lot and want quick, mouse-driven shortcuts

If you are a Windows user but intrigued by this idea, there's hope for you yet. For Windows users, SnipDo is the closest thing to PopClip I'm aware of. It’s the best match if you want the same “select text, then get actions” workflow, though I haven't tried it before.

Dave had mentioned something to me about PopClip recently (that he was thinking about getting into it). And lo and behold, here comes the update for the latest videos on screencasts online. And there was one about PopClip. I watched it and was ready to dive in and play.

Lee made it super easy to understand how it works and how to customize it to your liking. Here are the topics that Lee covers in the PopClip Updates Screencasts Online tutorial, in case you're interested:

• PopClip Overview
• Installing Extensions
• PopClip Settings
• Obsidian Extension
• Perplexity Extension
• ChatGPT Extension
• Open In Browser Extension

I have access to PopClip as part of my SetApp (ref link) subscription, but it is also available on their website to buy as either a standard or lifetime PopClip license.

Past Concerns About PopClip No Longer Are An Issue

I'm unclear at this point whether PopClip has changed a lot since I looked at it or whether I just never understood how it worked in the first place. No matter my concerns about it have been resolved as follows.

Popping Up When Not Needed

I remember years ago, downloading it and playing with it and instantly deciding it got in the way of my internet reading habit of constantly clicking and dragging across text as I read it. That often helps me focus when needing to consume something dense or otherwise hard to discern. I've learned I'm not alone on that click and drag habit, by the way, but now PopClip seems to be ready for someone like me to tap into the power of what it has to offer, while still getting to keep my pattern of doing this.

You have granular controls over where pop clip appears once you you click and drag across text and release your mouse or trackpad. You can determine if you want PopClip to appear automatically. Even after about 15 minutes of experimentation, I would say leaving this as the default really helps you leverage the real power of PopClip but if you had certain websites that you visited where it wasn't going to be particularly helpful you can have rules set up where it gets disabled based on a specific app, such as a browser, or specific websites that you would like to disable it on. I haven't done that again because of the controls under appearance. you can change the size of the pop clip as it pops up or you can change the color or whether or not it gets positioned above or below the text.

Getting carried away with extensions

Another concern I had was being so inspired by all these different possibilities that I got carried away and installed a bunch of extensions that would then do away with the simplicity of PopClip. As I look at my installed PopClip extensions right now, after only having the app for less than an hour, I've got 15 different actions. However what I'm realizing because of the ScreencastsONLINE tutorial I watched is that not all of the actions appear every single time pop clip may be evoked.

PopClip is context specific and only brings up the relevant actions for what you're in the middle of doing. A simple example of this is that spell check is only going to come up when you've selected a word that is misspelled. Otherwise, it remains in the background, invisible to you. You can also configure the order that your extensions appear such that your more commonly used ones are closer to the front of the line.

This 5-minute YouTube preview video of Lee's ScreencastsONLINE tutorial gives you a look at the extensions he suggests in the tutorial and is well worth a watch.

Early Experimentations

Installing PopClip and getting started was a breeze. This is particularly the case because of it being part of my SetApp subscription, as I mentioned earlier. The built-in actions are all easy to use and understand. I think if it were only the case that I would be offered easier ways to cut, copy, and paste, however, I probably would have skipped PopClip, entirely. Those basic keyboard shortcuts have been burned in my brain a long time. That said, PopClip has a lot more to offer than just those essentials. The other nice thing is it doesn't take long at all to both learn and to begin to get some of the features and functions into one's muscle memory.

Here's a bulleted list of some of the PopClip actions I think could be potentially potentially particularly helpful for my use cases. I'm sure I'll be finding more as well.

• Open link: In working with various LLMs and also coming across this issue in other cases, I find sometimes a link is presented to me but is not clickable. All I have to do with pop clip is select the text to activate pop clip or use the keyboard board shortcut I have established, and then I'm able to use this pop clip action to easily open the website. site. This was very easy to install and understand from the beginning.
• Title Case and Uppercase: These two functions are things I don't do that often, but when I do, I have to open up an entirely a separate app and try to remember how to use it. It's typically been so long. Now I can easily select text and have it modified in less than a second or two using these two actions.
• Timestamp: This one is also super simple, but will save me a ton of time. Anytime I attend a conference or go to a meeting, I always have the file name begin with a four-digit year followed by a dash, a two-digit month followed by a dash, by, you guessed it, a two-digit day. and now that's just going to be a simple muscle memory thing for me that I'll be able to pull up much faster than me sitting there trying to type it despite how fast I type on my 10 key. I can now get something like this in less than a second or two: 2026-04-10.
• Perplexity App: I have not been a big user of perplexity, but many people I highly regard do make use of it, this seemed an easy way to have other options when experimenting with artificial intelligence and wanting to see how its approach to a given prompt might vary from the others I use more frequently.

This is the first piece of writing I have done since installing PopClip and can already ready tell that it is not only not going to get in my way, it's going to be a tremendous his help to me. I imagine there are many more pop clip actions in my future.

One last thing I wanted to mention is I was talking earlier about getting PopClip into to my muscle memory, that's such a big part of computing for me. When watching Lee describe how he uses PopClip, He mentioned using command L to highlight the URL for the website he's currently on. I delighted when I saw that since that's something I do a gazillion times per day, but do not have that keyboard shortcut in my muscle memory. I have since added it to my keyboard shortcuts that I keep in the Tot App by the Icon Factory, so that as I'm learning new ones, I can remember to practice them and instill them into my habits.

This is the third post in a series about AI tools, broadly speaking, and Claude Cowork, specifically. The first post was about slowing down and giving yourself permission not to rush. The second addressed AI, privacy, and the risks worth understanding before diving in. This one is where I get specific about the framework I use when making decisions about my own use of AI and how I advise you to proceed with caution, given that you're not solely making decisions regarding your own risk profile.

I think of it as three categories of considerations: your employer, your own privacy, and other people's information. Working through each of these helped me figure out what I would and would not give Claude access to, when experimenting with Claude Cowork in recent weeks. Your situation will be different from mine, but I hope walking through my reasoning gives you a useful starting point.

Your Employer

If you work for yourself, you can probably skip this section. But many of us have at least one employer, and there are some things worth thinking through carefully before using any AI tool on anything work-related. This varies depending on where you live, and in the United States, it varies by state. I will speak in generalities without claiming to be an attorney, or even playing one on tv.

Most employers have something in their employee handbook about how equipment and systems belong to the institution, and how anything done on them should be for professional and business-related purposes. You should be familiar with your employer's policies around AI use.

There are also specific regulations to consider depending on your field and industry. In higher education, FERPA protects student information. Anything involving student data needs to stay within systems that have appropriate privacy protections in place.

For me, this is actually fairly clean, because I have some big walls up already. I use my own device, not a university-issued one. My university runs on Office 365, and the AI capabilities within that ecosystem, including Copilot in Outlook and other Microsoft tools, fall under the same privacy protections that cover the rest of Office 365. So if I am going to use AI on anything related to my work, especially anything that touches student data, that stays within Microsoft's tools and the privacy and security infrastructure set up by my employer.

That means Claude Cowork is for personal and professional work that is entirely separate from my university role. Anything involving students, course materials tied to my institution, or files that live within university systems stays out of it entirely.

If you are thinking through your own employer situation, the questions worth asking are: Does your institution have an AI policy? If so, what does it say about tools you bring in on your own? What data would you potentially be sharing, and does any of it fall under regulatory protections? And which AI tools, if any, are already approved and in use within your institution's existing systems?

This is a little bit of a tangent, but since we're talking about AI and policies, this repository of syllabi policies for Generative AI from Lance Eaton is worth bookmarking, as it is the most comprehensive one I've seen.

Your Own Privacy Comfort Level

This is the category that requires the most personal reflection, because it depends entirely on what you value and what you are comfortable with. Most of us haven't done sufficient thinking about privacy in general, let alone when applied to AI. Three links from Civics of Technology well worth exploring are:

1. Teaching Practical Privacy: Notes from a Librarian – guidance and resources on thinking through your digital security and digital privacy
2. Nothing to Hide: Student Arguments – Assignment that helps facilitate deeper thinking for students and lifelong learners
3. Privacy Week Events – Extensive reading list, resources, and video of their webinars

I have a few different mental buckets for my own information. At one end, there are things I am very protective of: personal journals and reflections, health information, financial data, anything that feels like something I would want shared or otherwise bought/sold. Another tangent here, because I just reminded myself of this famous speech from Lloyd (played by John Cusack) in the movie Say Anything. He talks about what he wants to do with his career, starting at the 1:00 minute mark.

Ok. Now we're back to the main topic, now that we've revisited not wanting to have anything to do with… well, hopefully you watched it… I digress… 

I would not keep any of that sort of information in files or folders that Claude can access. If I were going to journal consistently (sigh…), it would happen in an app specifically designed for that purpose, with the kind of encryption I am comfortable with. That is its own walled garden. I subscribe to Day One and have for years, and feel good about their privacy picture for my use cases.

At the other end, there is information that is already publicly available. I have been podcasting for over twelve years (and was regularly on Dave's Coaching for Leaders podcast before that. I have shared a lot of things on both shows. Transcripts of those episodes exist on the web. If something is the kind of thing I might have said publicly, I am generally less cautious about it being in an AI-accessible space.

Most of what I work with in Claude falls somewhere between those two ends. Notes I took on a book I was reading. Research I compiled on a topic. Working drafts of writing. These feel like appropriate things to have within Claude's reach. I have not given Anthropic permission to train on my data. That is a setting users can configure, and I strongly recommend you check yours.

One thing I have found worth doing is thinking not just about which apps or tools I give access to, but what is actually inside them. A notes app might have grocery lists right alongside something much more sensitive. A calendar might have a podcast recording and a medical appointment on the same week. It is worth going folder by folder, and sometimes note by note, rather than just making a whole-app decision. My default is to block access and go slow, until I have had the chance to think things through and carefully research the implications.

Other People's Information

This is the category I feel most strongly about, and it is also the one that requires the most nuance.

The hard line for me is this: I am not comfortable giving any AI access to someone else's phone number, date of birth, or email address. Those things are off limits, and I would not give Claude access to my contacts app — just as I've never given access to that sort of data when social media companies and business applications have tried to get me to share it.

But some of what I keep in my notes relates to people who are already publicly findable, and I think it is worth explaining where I draw that line.

I host the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, and I maintain records of the body of work we have built over the years on the website (which is openly licensed and free for anyone to use): episode numbers, guest names, topics we covered, key resources mentioned, and transcripts. Having those records accessible is simply part of how I do that work.

I take a similar approach with workshops I attend. My notes on an online workshop include the presenter's name, the topics covered, and key resources shared. The person's name is already online. Their slides are often publicly shared. Their name is associated with the event listing and its promotion. That is the kind of information I consider reasonable to keep in my Obsidian notes, which I have given Claude access to in some cases. The point is that I only keep within Claude's reach information that would otherwise be accessible via the open web.

If I attend a private or confidential conversation, one that is not recorded and where the content is not publicly available, those notes belong somewhere outside of any files or folders I have allowed Claude to access.

Revisit Your Permissions Over Time

One last thing worth saying: granting access is not a one-time decision. Most of us, once we have connected an app or given a tool permission, never go back to check on it. But your life changes, your files change, and the tools themselves change, including their privacy policies, sometimes significantly.

It is worth building a habit of auditing what you have connected, even briefly, every few months. Ask yourself: does this tool still need access to this? Has anything changed in what that folder or app contains? Have the terms of service changed in ways that would affect your decision?

The same thoughtfulness you bring to the initial decision is worth bringing back periodically.

Putting It Together

These three categories, your employer, your own privacy comfort level, and other people's information, have been the framework I have used to think through what I will and will not give Claude Cowork access to. My privacy risk profile is likely different than yours and I encourage you to remember to go slow.

Photo credit: Fabio on Unsplash

I don't want to throw any shade on people who enjoy setting goals for yourselves in a new year. Hooray to Taylor Kay Phillips, who took over Lyz Lenz's Dingus of the Week post this time, and said that she wants New Year's Resolution Wet Blankets to settle down and let other people have their things. This year, one reflective approach that is resonating with me immensely this time around comes from Robert Talbert, in the form of his My Start/Stop/Continue for 2026 post. CW: He's a bit down on resolutions in the beginning, but if you're a big fan of setting them, just skip to his Start section about Going Analog and enjoy seeing what he's up to…

Start: Creating with Regularity

Through an impulse purchase via Instagram advertising, I bought a year-long membership to the Art Makers Club at the tail end of the year. This all started with our son asking if he could participate in our revised advent plans for the holiday season (my goodness did our first attempt ever fail miserably) by doing digital art, instead of the watercolor the rest of us were doing. He likes using Procreate and mentioned offhand that it was one of those kinds of apps that you buy once (as in I/we already own it), which didn't become relevant until weeks later, when I considered this purchase.

My Art Makers Club purchase didn't start with an entire year, but rather a highly structured course. The Kickstart Your Creativity with Procreate got me excited from the premise. I'm a huge fan of being able to track my progress toward goals, so the included progress tracker was super appleaing to me. Wait a second? I get to take 15-20 minute tutorials from an encouraging, down-to-earth, clear communicator and learn to actually use an app I already own instead of continuing to gather virtual dust, like I had been? And I get to save my various drawings in the form of a tracker all along, so I can see how far I've come and where I'm going?

That was the hook, but it kept getting better from there. I also got a second Kickstart Your Creativity Course to go with it. But wait. There's more. A ton of other courses, such as:

• Imaginative Map-Making in Procreate
• Getting Started with Procreate Dreams: Animation for Everyone (ever since seeing Mike Wesch's very first animation video 10+ years ago: The Sleeper, I've dreamed of learning animation)
• Easy, Eye-Catching Animations in Procreate
• Realistic Paper Cut Illustrations in Procreate

There are ~5 other full length courses and then a bunch of previously-recorded live sessions, the opportunity to be a part of a community of people going through the courses, etc. I have now drawn from the orange through the poppy, as of January 3, 2026, not too shabby a result of a person who hasn't really taken art classes before.

Depending on how you define art, of course…

I also had bought one copy of Daily Drawing Prompts: A Year of Sketchbook Inspiration, by Jordan DeWilde for my Mom for Christmas and “accidentally” ordered a second copy for me. 😂😇 It has provided supplemental opportunities for reinforcing some of the skills I'm learning through the more structured courses.

As excited as I clearly am about these drawing resources, I want to keep my definition of regular creation broad. Alan Levine recently shared his reflections on having achieved an entire year of capturing daily photos throughout 2025. He has previously been such an inspiration for me in those years when we don't quite check every single box that we had hoped to… as in those years when he didn't quite get to 365 days/photos. Still, it was fun to see him share stories of what his daily photo habit looked like in 2025 and in years past.

I don't want to say up front that I'm shooting for a daily goal. My streaks habits seem to be multiplying and I don't want to put too much pressure on myself. As of today, I've used the Bend App to support 280 days of stretching. However, they let you “reset” your streak, once you've been consistent with it. So somewhere around 4-5 days, I missed stretching. But the following day was able to restore my streak without resetting the counter. I would love something like that for my daily create goal that is emerging, but I also am not inclined to figure out a whole system at this exact moment.

Stop: Checking Work Email on My Mobile Devices

This is one of those “I should 100% know better” things. I've gotta stop checking my work email on my mobile devices. One reason has to do with overall productivity. In The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, Annie Murphy Paul describes the benefits researchers found of working on a large display (versus on a laptop or mobile device):

When using a large display, they engaged in higher-order thinking, arrived at a greater number of discoveries and achieved broader, more integrative insights. Such gains are not a matter of individual differences or preferences, Ball emphasizes; everyone who engages with the larger display finds that their thinking is enhanced.

Before reading The Extended Mind, I always felt like I worked more effectively at either of my two big-screen set ups (home and work offices), but Murphy Paul uncovered a number of researchers exploring this hypothesis much more soundly than my anecdotal evidence. I just feel better and more able to focus in constructive ways when I'm engaging with my work via a large monitor.

Another reason I don't want to keep doing this in 2026 is just that it tends to get me feeling all the negative feels during a time when I'm not going to proactively going to be able to dig in with problem solving or attempts to communicate about issues. If an email is going to evoke a sense that things aren't right in a particular context, why not wait until I'm “in the saddle” and ready to “ride” toward a resolution vs stewing in the frustration needlessly. I don't get that many emails that make me angry, by the way. I've got it pretty darn good in that department. But even if it is just an email that is going to require some kind of follow up, I tend to delay taking any steps toward moving forward until such time that I'm back at my computer. Why not just enjoy the time more in whatever context I may have been in when I succumbed to the temptation to just “dip my toe” into my work email to “check in”.

As I prepare to live into this commitment (once again, as I have failed at this in the past), I will revisit Robert Talbert's Grand Unified Theory of Academic Email: Fixing the Missing Piece of the Clarify Process, as he helps those of us who may have a tendency to over-function to ask ourselves if whatever may have bubbled up in our email is actually ours to do something with… I would probably do well to re-listen to Brené Brown's Unlocking Us Podcast Episode: On Anxiety, Calm, and Over-/Under-Functioning. And Karen Costa's conversation with me on Episode 505: How Role Clarity and Boundaries Can Help Us Thrive.

Rinse and repeat. I feel a playlist coming on…

Continue: Finding Times to Go to Jazzercise with My Mom

Speaking of playlists, I've been having a bunch of opportunities to find great workout music, since I've been driving to Oceanside a number of times each week during this holiday break. If you've been listening to Teaching in Higher Ed for more than a couple of years, you may have “met” my Mom back on Episode 462: Teaching Lessons I Learned From Mom. During the episode, I read her a column I wrote for EdSurge about her: Teaching Lessons I Learned from Mom and then reflected with my mom on the death of her sister, Judy.

It takes ~45 minutes to make the drive from where I live to the Oceanside Jazzercise location where my Mom takes classes. The class, itself, is an hour, and then it's another hour to say my goodbyes and get back home. Yes, that's three hours anytime I go take a class with her. However, I've been telling myself that if I set a goal to take a class with her once or twice a month, during regular work weeks, and then a few times a week when we are on Spring break, that it would quickly add up to a whole lot more joy in my life. I rarely take lunch breaks at work, though I do often go for walks during the day with work friends (and sometimes former students, etc.). I'm having this inner dialog with myself about how much time I would actually “lose” from work if I were to keep this commitment vs what I would “gain” from the experiences.

Lest anyone reading this feel like you want to “fix” my stinkin' thinking on this front and tell me stories about how much time you wish you still had with someone you've lost… you may be somewhat relieved of your duties to know that I've already put some things in motion toward this idea. Kerry Mandulak (who has been on Teaching in Higher Ed a couple times before) was down in Oceanside with her family this past week and we hung out together after I went to Jazzercise with my Mom. She raved about the Airbnb where her family was staying. I've already booked one in the same complex for Spring Break and blocked out four opportunities to join my Mom for Jazzercise that week.

I'm headed down to the Lilly Conference on Tuesday and will stop and do a class with her on the way down. At this point, I just need to block a few more times in my calendar for Spring 2026 and I'll have just the structure I need to turn this all into a reality and a bunch of memories with my Mom… That, plus an ever-growing playlist of energizing workout songs…

Related Goals

Robert Talbert mentions how poorly people, in general, tend to do with our resolutions. However, on my goal-setting, I tend to do ok, much of the time. To that end, I plan on continuing a few other things throughout 2026. I commit to:

• Read at least 24 books (connect with me on StoryGraph, if you want to see how that's going and what I'm reading)
• Keep stretching daily using the Bend App
• Continue closing my Apple Watch rings (currently at an 845 days streak, which kinda scares me a bit, just because I think occasional breaks are ok and even healthy to take)
• Apply to present at a conference at another country with a couple of collaborators and see if we're successful at getting to share our work in an entirely difference context than I will have ever experienced in my life (and I used to travel a ton for work in my younger days, so that's saying something)
• Air an episode of Teaching in Higher Ed each week for the entire year, keeping yet-another streak alive… making it 12+ years of consistent conversations about teaching and learning