You Can Turn Your Mac Menu Bar Into a Virtual Sticky Note

There is nothing wrong with putting sticky notes on your computer monitor—it’s quick and easy. It’s also a little bit in the way, meaning whatever you write down will be hard to forget. It just doesn’t work well, however, for modern Macs, with their tiny bezels. Meanwhile, there’s this menu bar, taking up all sorts of room on your Mac, most of it empty. Why not use some of that space as a virtual sticky note?

One Thing is a simple app that lets you do just that. You can click this application any time to leave yourself a message.

Credit: Justin Pot

Type whatever you want here and it will show up on the menu bar. You can add emojis for emphasis or use Markdown, a simple formatting language, to formate your text or even add a clickable link. You can only leave one thing, as the name of the app applies—the intention is for you to use this to remind you of what you’re currently supposed to be working on. It’s just as good for reminders, though, or even a little encouraging note for yourself.

There are a few customization options: You can change the maximum width, the font size, and the color. You can also change the alignment, which is handy if some other app you’re using has text that doesn’t quite line up with One Thing.

Credit: Justin Pot

You can also set keyboard shortcuts to open the edit window, clear the current note, or paste your clipboard to the menu bar.

Credit: Justin Pot

There are other ways to quickly add a note—Apple’s “Share” menu is supported, for one things, and the support for Apple Shortcuts, meaning you could set up an automation that pushes text from your to do list app—the developer offers an an example shortcut that pulls in the next todo in Things.

You can ignore all of those features and still get a lot out of this app, though. Overall, this is a simple application you can use to leave yourself reminders somewhere that’s impossible to ignore.