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

WRITTEN BY RYAN BUTT

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 we perform 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 maximize the effectiveness of your Finder

1 Change the layout

To change how Finder displays a folder, open any folder and go to View >Show View Options. Here, you can change how the contents should be grouped and more. Use shortcuts to change the view: press Cmd+1 (icon), +2 (list), +3 (column) or +4 (gallery).

2 Sidebar control

Go to Finder > Preferences > Sidebar and then tick all of the items you would like to see displayed in the sidebar of your Finder windows. In the “General” settings, you can also opt to display external disks and suchlike on your desktop, which can be useful.

3 Show Path Bar

Particularly useful when performing Spotlight searches, while in Finder, go to View > Show Path Bar and then a visual pathway to a file will be at the bottom of Finder. Open a folder from the Path Bar by Ctrl+clicking and selecting “Open in New Tab”.

4 Customize your toolbar

The Finder window toolbar itself can be customized by Ctrl+clicking on it. By doing this you can determine how the various options are displayed and select “Customize Toolbar” to drag new, currently undisplayed items into the toolbar. Get it working for your needs.

Make use of Mission Control

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

5 Your Spaces

Your virtual desktops, or “Spaces”, are presented as thumbnails at the top of the desktop, simply click on the thumbnail of the Space you wish to use to jump straight there and make it full–screen and “active”. Hover over a Space and click the “X” icon to close that Space.

6 Set it up

Go to System preferences > Mission Control and you’ll be able to set up how Mission Control works — if you want to use an app, then you can determine whether you switch to a “Space” where that app is already open. You can also click on “Hot Corners” and apply Mission Control to a set corner.