Intro; In the spirit of this video being all about
saving time I’m going to keep this intro short and sweet - there are things you can
do on your Mac to save you time, and help you get more done, and in this video I’m
going to share 10 of those tips with you.
OK, let’s get into it.
Make use of Text Snippets; If you find yourself having to type the same
things out repeatedly, there are 2 tips that you can make use of.
The first is Text Replacement.
Head to System Settings, scroll down to Keyboard, and then click on Text Replacements.
This is a function of Macs, iPhone and iPads that’s designed to allow you to input small
passages of text automatically by typing in a shortcut.
So for example, a really common one that people like to use is typing out the @ symbol twice,
and having that automatically swap out to your email address.
You’d set this one up by clicking the plus icon to create a new Text Replacement, then
in the replace field, you’d type @@, and then in the With field, you’d type your
email address.
Now, each time you type @@ in any part of your Mac, your Mac will automatically replace
it with your email address.
This is a really handy function that you can use for lots of different things, but it is
limited to only work on small passages of text.
If you want to use this for something larger, like say a paragraph of text that you often
have to input into emails or documents, you can use Text Snippets, and to do that, do
the following.
Open the Notes app and create a new note, then type or copy and paste the text you’d
like to input into the Note.
Then reposition the Notes app so that you can see both Notes and Finder in the same
window, and I like to ensure that Finder is showing my desktop, although this isn’t
crucial.
Click and drag to highlight all of your text, then drag that text onto your desktop.
This will create a Text Snippet file, which you can then rename.
Now what I’m going to do is go to my Documents, or wherever you like, and I’m going to create
a new folder called Text Snippets, and I’m going to put this text snippet in that folder.
I’m then going to drag that folder onto the sidebar here, so that I’ve always got
it available to me at short notice.
Now, next time you’re typing out something in an email or a document, and you want to
insert the paragraph of text we just created, you would simply open Finder, click into the
Text Snippets folder, and drag and drop the file right into your document, exactly where
you want it.
It’s that simple, and I’m sure you can imagine how much time you’re going to save
by not having to type a massive chunk of text out every single time!
Enable Show Path Bar and Show Status Bar in Finder;
A significant time waster on Macs, especially if you’re coming to them from a Windows
environment, is trying to figure out where on your Mac you currently are.
To fix this, so long as you’re in Finder, go to View and ensure that Show Path Bar and
Show Status Bar are selected.
Doing that will then put these two bars at the bottom of each of your Finder windows.
The top one shows you your current path, and you can click to navigate back if you need
to, while the bottom one shows you how large the current folder you’re looking at is,
and how much space you have available on your drive.
Descript Integration; Before we go any further, I want to say thank
you to the sponsor of today’s video, Descript.
Descript is an app that makes editing audio and video as user-friendly as editing a document,
and thanks to the new Storyboard version they’ve just released, you can now do even more, with
fewer clicks.
If you create videos or podcasts, you’ve probably used your fair share of timeline
editors – they can be really technical and time-consuming.
Descript changes all that by letting you work in a more familiar layout, and covering a
lot of the manual work for you.
It’ll transcribe your video into a script to start with.
Just go ahead and make changes to it, like you would a word processing document or a
slide deck.
Or, let’s say you’ve recorded a podcast, and you notice a mistake, after you’ve recorded.
No more having to get your audio equipment out to fix one small error.
Just delete words onscreen or use Overdub to create brand new audio, realistically matched
to your voice.
But the best part of the storyboard update is the concept of scenes – divide videos
into segments, just by tapping slashes into your script and everything’s quicker from
there.
To add images, like your brand logo, simply drag onto the scene.
You can even use the built-in media library . The same applies to video – drag it across
and Descript automatically trims everything to fit.
You can still change things, but it’s slick and intuitive - no more searching through
hours of tiny timeline markers.
The same goes for titles – I just need to name this guest speaker, for example.
The app uses recognisable icons, like a toolbar of shortcuts above the canvas.
And then you have awesome new AI features to play with, like green screen to replace
backgrounds.
So if you’re new to video or itching to ditch the old timeline method of working - it’s
easy to get started with Descript – try it out for yourself using the link in this
video’s description.
Make better use of Siri on the Mac; You most likely already use Siri on your iPhone,
but Siri can also do a LOT on your Mac.
First of all, ensure that Siri is enabled by opening up System Settings, then choosing
Siri and Spotlight, and ensure that Ask Siri is enabled.
You can then access Siri through a number of methods.
Your Mac can listen out for the standard phrase that you use to access it, I’ll put it on-screen
now rather than say it.
If you’ve got a keyboard layout that looks like mine, you can access it by pressing and
holding this button here, or you can click the Siri icon in the menu bar in the upper
right.
There’s loads that Siri can do on your Mac, far too much to cover everything in this one
video, but a few good examples of what you can do to save you some time are things like;
Ask it to open a specific app instead of you trying to find it by saying ‘Open Notes’
for example.
Set a timer, which can be great if you prescribe to a productivity method like the Pomodoro
technique for example, so you could say ‘set a 25 minute pomodoro timer’.
You could say Create a Note, and then you would speak out the contents of the note once
prompted.
You could say something like ‘set up a meeting tomorrow at 10’, and it will create a blank
meeting with the time and date information that you requested, and then you would fill
in the blanks.
You could ask it to convert for you.
I use this all the time, in my business I often deal in US dollar, but obviously here
in the UK we use the pound, so I often ask Siri to convert dollars into pounds for me,
you could also use this for measurements, distances etc.
Make better use of Spotlight Search; Spotlight search is another tool on your Mac
that I think most people know exists, but probably aren’t making particularly good
use of.
Simply hit Command and the Space bar on your keyboard, or if you’ve got a keyboard that
looks like mine, you can tap the F4 key, and then simply start typing in whatever you’re
looking for.
At it’s most basic, Spotlight search can help you quickly find things on your Mac.
So if you’re looking for a specific file or a specific folder, simply start typing
it in, and you can then either click into a result, or use your arrow keys to navigate
through.
Use the space bar to open a preview of the document before committing to fully open it.
You can also use Spotlight to search for emails, provided you use Apple’s own mail software.
But you can also use Spotlight search for other, more advanced things, like conversions.
If you wanted to find out what 2,000 US dollars were in pounds for example, simply type two
thousand dollars like you see here, and you can see that Spotlight has already assumed
that, with me being in the UK, I might want to see the conversion for it, and you can
see it here.
But you can also quickly pivot from a computer search to a web search for example, simply
by scrolling down the results, and clicking on the Search the Web feature where that shows
up.
Spotlight will often allow you to skip that step by pretty much running the searches for
you, and showing them in this section here.
My main tip with Spotlight search, is to make a conscious effort to start using it more,
and see if the things that it can do make a difference to you and your workflow.
It’s super powerful once you get used to using it.
Create Smart Folders; I’ve talked about Smart Folders in my Apple
Notes tutorials, as it’s a relatively new feature there, but did you know Smart Folders
have existed here on your Mac for years now?
They’re easy to create, and can be a great organisation tool.
A smart folder is a folder that contains a list of files that all have something in common,
and the great thing about them is that they will not only group together existing files,
they’ll also group together any future files that fit the criteria of the Smart Folder.
Let me show you how to make one.
We open Finder, then go to File, and Choose New Smart Folder.
To show you how this works, I’m going to create a Smart Folder that will group together
all files that are 1GB in size or larger, and I’ll call it Large Files.
So first of all, I’m going to ensure this option is set to This Mac.
Then I’m going to press this little Plus button over here on the right.
In this dropdown, we can choose from a range of options, but as you can imagine, for this
we want to choose File Size.
In the next field, I’m going to choose ‘is greater than’.
Annoyingly, there isn’t an option to choose ‘equals or is greater than’, you have
to choose one or the other, so I’ll simply say ‘is greater than’, and then choose
999 megabytes, which is close enough to what I want.
You can see that, as I type in the criteria, results begin to appear, so you can use this
to fine-tune your results.
You could add more criteria if you want to, again this seems to work on an ‘And’ basis
rather than an ‘Or’ basis, so keep that in mind, and when you hit Save, you’ll be
prompted to give the folder a name, and can choose to add it straight to the sidebar if
you wish, which is probably a good idea.
And just like that, you’ve now got a quick method of being able to see any large files
on your Mac at the click of a button.
Obviously, there are lots of ways that you could use this, and if you find a particularly
helpful use for it, why not drop a comment, and let me know what you did?
Use Safari Tabs for sharing websites; Safari Tab Groups are really useful, for a
couple of different reasons.
On the one hand, if you have a collection of websites that you often have open, perhaps
at the same time, you could create a Tab Group for them.
Maybe for work, you’ve got a company portal open, and maybe a couple of other websites,
you could cluster those together into one Tab Group and call it work.
Then instead of having to open each one individually each time, you just click on the Tab Group,
and they’ll all load up.
The other really good use case for Tab Groups is sharing information with someone else.
Maybe you’re researching for a trip for example.
Let me show you what I mean.
Let’s say that my wife and I are planning a trip, and I’ve been on all these websites,
which I think are all pretty useful, and I want to share them all with her.
So what I could do, is go to File, and then choose New Tab Group with 3 Tabs.
The Tab Group is created, and I can see it in the sidebar here on the left, I can rename
it if I want to.
But then where this is really useful, is I can choose Share, and I can then share the
Tab Group with my wife.
So, rather than sharing individual links, she just gets one invite to a tab group in
safari, and then open up the sites at her leisure, and see the same information that
I’ve been looking at.
She can even add new tabs to the group, which I can then view at my side.
Set Open with Default App; How many times have you double clicked on
a file on your Mac, only for it to open up in an application that you didn’t want it
to open up in?
There’s a really easy fix for this.
Find a file in Finder, left click to select it, then press the Command key and the i key
on your keyboard.
This will give you information about the file, which in this example is a WAV file.
Under Open With, select the application you’d like all WAV files to open with in the future.
Once you’ve done this, you’ll never again have to worry about a file opening up in the
wrong application.
Proper Weekly; By the way, if you’re enjoying the content,
why not consider signing up for my newsletter, The Proper Weekly?
I include some tech news, a behind the scenes of what’s happening here on the channel,
as well as a tip for a product in the Apple ecosystem.
The newsletter goes out each Friday, it’s free to sign up, and I’ll include the sign
up link in the description of this video.
Convert Images and Make PDFs quickly; If you use your Mac to work with images, there
are a couple of quick actions that you should absolutely be aware of.
Firstly, if you right click on an image file, then head to Quick Actions, you can choose
Remove Background.
This will obviously have more success with some images than it will with others, but
your Mac will quickly create a copy of the image with the background removed.
Also under Quick Actions, you can convert the image.
This is great if you need to convert the image from one file format to another, so maybe
change a JPEG to a PNG for example, but you can also keep the same file format, but alter
the size of it.
So if you’ve ever had a situation where you’ve tried to upload a photo online, but
been told the file is too big, this is a really quick way of resolving that issue.
You simply choose the format you want to change to, and the image size.
This also works if you select multiple images, even if they’re all different formats.
And on the topic of selecting multiple images in the same format, you can right click, choose
Quick Actions, and then choose Create PDF.
Your computer will immediately create a PDF of the images, and if you double click to
open it up, you can even organise the images in whatever order you’d like.
And then finally, you can markup an image.
You can do that using your keyboard and mouse if you like, or if you own an iPhone or an
iPad, you can tap this button, choose the relevant option, and your computer will immediately
open the image on your device, for you to markup over there.
System Preferences - Press and Hold; System Preferences has had a visual overhaul
on the Mac recently, and while everything is still there, you do now have to get used
to a new way of navigating through the available options.
Did you know however, that if you want to quickly jump straight into a specific part
of System Settings, you can simply click and hold on the icon in your Dock, and you’ll
get this list of options appear on-screen.
Simply click on the one that you want, and Settings will open in that menu.
Screenshots straight to clipboard; And finally, you no doubt already know that
you can take a screenshot by pressing Command, Shift and the number 5 on your keyboard, then
choose from whether you want to take a screenshot of the entire screen, or a portion of it,
or a specific window.
If you choose window, notice that when you take a screenshot, you get this shadow on
the screenshot.
Some people really like the way that looks, others don’t, but if you want to take a
screenshot without it, simply hold the option key as you press Capture.
Also, your screenshots will by default go to your desktop.
If you’d prefer to instead have them go to the clipboard, ready for you to paste into
a document, simply hold the Control key as you capture the screenshot.
And both of the aforementioned buttons will work together, so if you’d like a screenshot
with no background, and for it to go to your clipboard, press Command, Shift and 5 on your
keyboard, then hold the Control and Option key together while you press capture.
Easy.
End; So there you go, that’s 10 ways that you
can use your Mac to get more done, much more quickly.
What do you think?
Any good tips that I’ve missed from this list?
Drop me a comment and let me know.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like, and
subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.