Proven ways to speed up your productivity and reclaim minutes, if not hours, every day!

We are creatures of habit that can easily fall into the trap of using our Apple devices in certain ways, while neglecting to drill down further into the inner workings of macOS and iOS to discover how these processes can be made easier. Our Macs, for example, have always come with keyboard shortcuts that can shave seconds off of the functions weperform tens, if not hundreds of times every day, but do you know them? And as macOS has evolved, there are certain settings that can be tweaked to speed up everything from writing to finding things quickly. The same can be said of iOS, which is similarly packed with handy tricks to streamline the effort needed to perform everyday tasks. Over the following pages, we aim to showcase these hidden features and help you do more in less time.

Set up your Finder windows

Here are some options you can tweak to maximise the effectiveness of your Finder windows.

Make use of Mission Control

09 Auto-wake

Rather than having to go through the rigmarole of waking and unlocking your Mac when you sit down to work, why not schedule it to wake in advance so that it’s ready for when you are? Go to System Preferences>Energy Saver>Schedule, tick ‘Start up or wake’ and then schedule the desired time.

10 Manage Dock

If your Dock is getting in the way of your apps, then you can make adjustments to its behaviour and position by going to System Preferences>Dock & Menu Bar. Tick the ‘Automatically hide and show the Dock’ option to make it vanish and only appear when you glide your cursor to the bottom of the screen.

11 Tidy up desktop

Is your Mac desktop a mess of images, files, folders and god knows what? Then make things instantly easier to find by ctrl+clicking on the desktop and choosing the ‘Use Stacks’ option. This neatly organises everything into stacks of similar kinds – Images, Documents, etc. Click on one to see the contents.

Rather than have multiple apps clutter up your desktop, consider using Mission Control to create virtual desktops for different apps.

12 Use Hot Corners

Go to System Preferences> Mission Control>Hot Corners and you will be able to apply shortcuts to the four corners of your Mac display that you can move your cursor to in order to instantly trigger the effect. The options you can apply are limited, but will help speed up certain tasks.

13 Use Voice Control

A proven Mac time-saver is to use your voice to control your Mac. Go to System Preferences>Accessibility and then click on ‘Voice Control’ in the sidebar. Tick ‘Enable Voice Control’ and then you’ll be able to speak commands to your Mac to bypass the need to manually perform tasks.