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Mac Keyboard Shortcuts: Your Key to Faster, More Efficient Work
As a Mac user, you likely spend a significant amount of time typing on your keyboard. While the mouse or trackpad is a useful tool for pointing and clicking, constantly moving your hand to use it can disrupt your workflow and slow down your productivity. This is where the best keyboard shortcuts for Mac come in handy. By memorizing and utilizing these shortcuts, you can streamline your workflow and accomplish tasks more efficiently.
According to this study, people waste an average of 2 seconds per minute by switching between mouse and keyboard — that’s 3% of your workday! Learning just one keyboard shortcut could save you several hours each year. And for those who work on a computer for eight hours per day, keyboard shortcuts can save up to 8 workdays per year. Not to mention the fact that using keyboard shortcuts can also make you happier, because you are less likely to be interrupted by having to navigate menus and can thus stay in a “flow” state for longer, which is known to be beneficial to work satisfaction.
In this article, we’ll explore some essential Mac keyboard shortcuts and provide tips on how to discover and remember them to boost your productivity, to help you be more efficient, productive and happy at work!
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9 Tips to Bill Time Accurately and Boost Your Bottom Line
Image: Wes HicksDoes your business bill time for each project? If so, you’ll know how important it is to track your time accurately. You need to know exactly how much time a particular project takes so that you can quote and invoice correctly, and you need to have a clear sense of whether you’re working productively or if there are more hours you could be billing.
There are countless businesses that operate this way. Those in the legal profession will be all too familiar with this approach, as will accountants, consultants and creatives, including copywriters, designers and developers. Freelancers across industries, who account for 36% of the workforce in the US, as well as agencies, regularly break their work down into hours and bill their time accordingly.
But even if you’re familiar with logging your time, are you sure you’re maximizing your billable hours? Are you working smartly and efficiently? Could you be billing more for your projects and boosting your bottom line? We’re here to offer some handy tips on making your time work for you, and to answer your questions, too.
Take a look at our comprehensive list of tips to help you bill for time — and develop a more successful business while you’re at it.
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Time Management Matrix: How to Focus on What’s Important
When we’re busy at work or in our personal lives, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by long lists of tasks. We often rush to check items off our to-do list, regardless of their value or timeline. This behavior feels like getting things done, even though not all tasks are the same, and most of them will never help us achieve our goals. But you can get past all that with the Time Management Matrix, which is also called the “Eisenhower Matrix”.
You see, productivity isn’t about working harder or longer – that’s poor time management. Yes, simply working more will cross more items off your list, but it rarely helps create real change in your life. That’s why productivity is more about doing the right things.
How do you work on the right tasks? With prioritization.
Prioritization seems simple, but it’s an advanced skill that few people do well. It’s hard to look at our work objectively and accept that some won’t happen, especially when we’re overwhelmed.
The Time Management Matrix is a powerful tool to organize your work based on importance and urgency. It helps you focus on the tasks that matter most and avoid the ones that don’t help you achieve your goals.
This article explains the Eisenhower Matrix, its advantages, who it’s for, and how it works. Then we offer some tips to use it well.
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Google Calendar Time Insights: A Comprehensive Guide (Updated 2023)
Image: Gaining VisualsHow much time do you spend in meetings every week? For many of us, it’s more than we would like to admit. But if you want to know for sure, it’s best to use a dedicated tool, like Google Calendar Time Insights. With the information this feature offers, you can assess whether meetings are occupying too much of your time, and make the necessary adjustments so that you can stay focused, improve your productivity, and enjoy a better work-life balance.
According to this article, 78% of workers believe their meeting schedules are chaotic, with 38% blaming upper management and 16% blaming their direct manager. An incredible 64% of employees are only excited about meetings when they’re well-planned, which isn’t always the case. If left ungoverned, meetings can often become long, tedious and unproductive, pulling people away from completing actual work.
Does this mean that all meetings are pointless? Absolutely not. Some are critical. Others add value, even if they’re not essential. And sometimes it is just nice to have a conversation with and bounce ideas off other humans, especially if you work remotely.
To stay productive and get the most value out of your work, however, it is important to determine how much time you’re spending in meetings, and to know which are important and which, quite literally, could have been an email.
Google Calendar Time Insights can help with this. It’s a simple tool that helps you track meeting times. Let’s take an in-depth look at how it works.
(Want to get some of your questions answered straight away? Simply skip to our frequently asked questions section at the end.)
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Screen Time for Mac: Everything You Need to Know
Image source: Damian PatkowskiBeing aware of how we spend our time can help us be more productive and focused. By revealing patterns of behavior, it can also help us to find a balance between the time we spend on different activities. But how do we know where our time is going? Using a time tracking tool such as Screen Time for Mac is a useful place to start. (But, it’s not the only option!)
Screen Time was an iPhone and iPad feature first, but it’s been available across all Apple devices, including Macs, for some time. Mac Screen Time first came out with macOS 10.15 Catalina, and has continued to be available on all subsequent versions, including macOS 11 Big Sur, macOS 12 Monterey and macOS 13 Ventura.
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The Dangers of Work Overload and How to Avoid It (for You and Your Team)
Whether you’re the team leader, part of a team, or work for yourself, you’ve probably dealt with work overload. It’s a tricky condition that creeps up in organizations of any size. If work overload is unchecked, it can profoundly impact your people and work products.
In this article, we dive into work overload, its impact, and the steps you can take to avoid it. You can save your team from burnout and continue producing high-quality work with the right processes and tools.
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Billable Hours and Non-billable Hours: How Time Tracking Tools Can Help You Find Balance
Allocating your time correctly is a freelancing necessity, and that means understanding and knowing how to manage your billable hours and non-billable hours. More than that, you need to be able to find the right balance between the two.
Billable hours are important, they’re the money generators. But they’re often only possible because you’ve spent non-billable time working on marketing your business and refining your sales pitch. Non-billable hours, however, don’t earn you any direct income. So while they’re often critical to your business growth, it can be hard to tell whether they’re worthwhile and to what extent.
Figuring out how to make your billable and non-billable time work for you can be tricky, but it’s not impossible. And getting it right can help to maximize your productivity, remove inefficiencies in your business, and boost your bottom line. We’re here to show you how.
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Introducing Timing 2023.1: Analyze Your iPhone and iPad Usage with Timing!
Timing has always been a great tool to keep track of how you spend time on your Mac, but we know that many of you also use your mobile devices for work and personal use. Up until now, however, it has not been possible to collect your iPhone and iPad usage in the same way as your Mac usage.
But this changes today: We are excited to announce Timing 2023.1, which introduces a new feature that a lot of you have been asking for: Timing can now import your iPhone and iPad usage from Screen Time!
This feature, available in the Expert and Connect editions of Timing, lets you manage your time spent on mobile devices just like your Mac usage, with the full functionality of Timing’s timeline and activity list. Even Timing’s rules are available to automatically categorize your mobile device usage.
Using Timing to display your mobile activity has several advantages over the limited device usage view in the iOS and macOS system settings:
- A timeline that shows exactly when you used each device, and for what. No more guesswork, as opposed to Screen Time’s “hourly” granularity!
- Review any time range you want, rather than being limited to Screen Time’s day/week views.
- Archive Screen Time data for longer than the four weeks Apple allows.
- Categorize your mobile activities into projects using drag-and-drop.
- Timing can show even the full URLs of the websites you visited in Mobile Safari.
- You can quickly create manual time entries to annotate and categorize whole blocks of your mobile activity at once.
In addition to this new integration, Timing 2023.1 also features plenty of usability improvements. You can find an overview of all the changes in our release notes.
Read on for more information on how how to set up the integration, and what to expect from it!
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Employee Monitoring vs. Time Tracking: How to Help Your Team Do Their Best Work
According to a survey by MIT, 34% of the US workforce has shifted to some type of remote work arrangement. The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t start the remote work trend, but it certainly accelerated it. For many businesses, the only options were to transition to remote work or close down.
This shift presents a challenge for some employers and team leaders. Where once they could monitor their team’s progress by simply roaming the office and having casual conversations, now they need to enlist digital tools to collect data on how their teams spend their time.
Because of this shift, some people are fearful of personal data security. We know the benefits of having our data harvested and analyzed, but we’re also aware of the risks. If a company doesn’t handle our data appropriately, we become exposed to abuse and privacy violations. The potential dangers make many people wary of digital tracking tools that monitor our actions, what we create, and the types of information we access.
As an employer or team leader, you naturally want information regarding the activities and productivity of your team. You need that data to make intelligent business decisions. But how much is too much? What are the appropriate types of information to track? Like many employers, you’re probably wrestling with these questions and more.
There are two main options for studying your team’s work and helping them do their best: employee monitoring and time tracking. This article explains these options and why traditional employee monitoring is too heavy-handed for modern workers.
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Why Time Tracking is Critical for Remote Teams
Remote work is here to stay. While some companies still resist this new cultural trend, many embrace it. According to a study by The New York Times, 68% of employers “allow workers to telecommute as needed.” This trend was picking up speed before the pandemic, but COVID-19 seriously boosted it.
It’s no surprise that workers are happier and more productive when they control where and when they work. Some work better in the early hours before the rest of the world wakes up. Others prefer to work in the evening. Some sit at their cozy, in-home office, while others tour their city, visiting new cafes, parks, and libraries.
Remote work is popular among families, as well. Childcare costs are more expensive than ever, so working from home while kids play can be a significant income bump.
As remote work becomes mainstream, organizations must implement new workflows, systems, and tools to support this work style. They are finding new ways to manage their changing workforce, and one vital tool of this transition is time tracking.
We’ve discussed the benefits of time tracking in the past and the importance of using time tracking for teams. In this article, we want to focus on remote teams and the benefits time tracking offers for businesses and people.
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