ClipStack
A clipboard stacking utility that parses large blocks of text and queues them for one-at-a-time pasting — built to solve a quiet productivity drain affecting the whole team.
Problem
At CoStar, productivity is measured in volume. Our team processes hundreds of neighborhood page captions — writing, cleaning, and publishing them one by one into an attachment manager. I noticed I was losing significant time to repetitive pasting, and that the problem wasn't unique to me. My team was hitting the same wall, just quietly.
Solution
I built ClipStack, a clipboard stacking utility that lets you grab large blocks of text and parse them by line break, punctuation, or custom Regex patterns. The parsed items queue into a clipboard stack, and each time you paste, the next item loads automatically. Users can skip items, navigate forward and back, or restart the queue. I also added a persistent library for storing frequently reused snippets. After a testing round with select team members, I refined the UI based on their feedback: adding a taskbar counter showing remaining items, an always-on-top mode, and a pin to keep it accessible without interrupting the workflow.
Outcome
ClipStack was distributed across the department and became a core part of our publishing workflow. Nobody asked for it — but once people had it, they did not want to work without it. The real win was not just speed, it was reducing the friction that was quietly draining focus throughout the day. It was one of the first times I saw firsthand how a small, well-designed tool can change the way an entire team works.