5 Ways to Work Faster With Your Mac

Increase your productivity with your Mac computer.

In this article you’ll learn five great tips to help you work more effectively with Mac OS X.

We all want to save time when working, and there are hundreds of ways you can work more effectively with your Mac computer.

Here are just a few:

1. Learn and Use Keyboard Shortcuts

Most Mac applications provide two, three, or four-key shortcuts for common tasks. Look in the menu bar of each app to see the available shortcuts. If you’re not sure what the symbols in the menus mean, switch to the Finder, choose Help > Mac Help, and search the help for “Symbols for special keys”. You can also create your own shortcuts for any menu item with Applications > System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts.

2. Speed Up Common Tasks with Automator

If you find yourself doing the same task again and again, create an Automator workflow for it. Automator (Applications > Automator) is Apple software that lets you create scripts, or workflows, that you can run automatically with the click of a button.

3. Control iTunes Quickly with SizzlingKeys

SizzlingKeys (http://www.yellowmug.com/sk4it/) is a simple utility that lets you assign keyboard shortcuts to common iTunes actions, such as play/pause, previous/next track, and volume up/down. You can then use the shortcuts to control iTunes from within any application. This is great as it saves you having to switch to iTunes when you want to pause a song, for example.

4. Organize your Dock

Remove programs that you never use from the Dock to make it easier to find the ones you do. And if you find yourself regularly using a new piece of software, add it to the Dock. (An easy way to do this is to Control-click the icon in the Dock when the software’s running and choose Keep In Dock.)

5. Get a Handle on Spam

Junk email is a big time-waster. To reduce the amount of spam you get, only give out your email address to people you know and trust. If you need to register for something on a website and you don’t trust their privacy policy, create an additional “disposable” email address and use that. Then you can drop that email address if it starts getting a lot of spam. Finally, take advantage of online spam filtering services, as well as Apple Mail’s excellent built-in spam filter. That way, even if you do get spam, most of the time you’ll never need to deal with it.

About the author

Matt Doyle is a writer, Web developer, and converted Mac-head. Grab lots more handy Mac tips and tricks in his Mac blog, http://mac.elated.com/

Author: Matt Doyle
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: WordPress plugin Guest Blogger