Five paradigms, real setup steps, honest tradeoffs. From free built-in macOS features to dedicated apps. Pick the one that matches how your brain works, not whichever has the loudest reviews. The hidden time tax of repetitive typing Most knowledge workers retype the same handful of phrases dozens of times a day. Email signatures. Standard replies. Code snippets. AI prompts that always start the same way. Your full address when filling forms. The phrase "Thanks, let me know if you have any questions" lives somewhere between muscle memory and pure resentment. If you type even ten common phrases ten times each per day, that's 100 chances to save 30 seconds. Forty minutes a day. Three and a half hours a week . The math compounds quickly. This guide is the working tour of every method I've actually used on macOS. There are five distinct paradigms — not five products, but five different mental models for how to not retype things. Most articles confuse these and recommend a tool without explaining the model.…