How to boost productivity with eight Mac hacks for work-from-home moms
When you’re a mom, working from home is the most convenient gig you can get. You can make money while taking care of your children. No nursery service or nanny needed.
It can be a double-edged sword, however. If you’re not careful you can get distracted. Picking up your phone to answer a text can escalate into two hours of scrolling through your social media feed real quick.
If you have a Mac, you can limit phone-based distractions by answering your text messages on your computer. There are other Mac hacks that will keep you productive when you work from home. Check out this guide to learn more.
1) Filter out noise
Depending on what your job entails, conference calls are a big part of working from home. If you have a house full of children not to mention pets, it can be hard to find a quiet room to have your video calls.
There’s an app for that. It’s called Krisp and it’s free to download for your Mac. It will filter out the noise from that loud crash in the kitchen and stop it from reaching the ears of all your co-workers.
It will also filter out noises on their end too making for clear, interrupted conversations.
2) Stack up your desktop icons
After a while of downloading and using files, your desktop might begin to get a little bit messy. The more cluttered your desktop gets, the harder it will be to find the programs you need.
Get organized by stacking up your icons. Click on any blank area of your desktop and open up the “View” menu. From there, select “use stacks”. That should lump your files together into categories.
This method is good but not perfect. You may want to make a few changes to the way your files are grouped. You can do that by clicking on “View” followed by “Group Stacks By”. If you have an outdated MAC, you should consider selling Macbook Air and getting the latest model.
3) Send and receive texts on your Mac
It never fails, you pick up your phone to answer a text message and end up scrolling through your social media feed for hours. Now you’re way behind schedule.
Besides cutting back on distractions, receiving texts on your computer allows you to save phone battery and it’s more accurate. To do this cool Mac hack you’ll have to have an iPhone.
Open up the settings menu on your phone and go to messaging. Click on “Text Message Forwarding” and that’s all there is to it.
4) Text replacements
Everyone has a set of phrases that they type pretty much every day. You can save a lot of time by letting your Mac fill in these phrases instead of typing them in all the time.
Go to the Apple menu and click on system preferences. Once you’re in that menu go to “Keyboard” followed by “Text”.
In the “replace” box, type in a short cut, for example, “omw”. In the “with” box, you’ll type in what you want omw replaced with. In this case, it would be “on my way”!
Your Mac will already have a few of these suggestions done for you. You can delete these and plug in some of your own or add to them as you see fit.
5) Record screens
Say, you’re using an app to work when it crashes and bugs out on you. Now, you have to send a long, drawn-out error report to customer support. It takes away from the time that you could have spent working.
Instead of telling them what’s going on, wouldn’t it be more effective to show them? There is a way to do this. You can record the screen of any Apple product by using Mac OS hacks.
Start by plugging the device into your Mac. Open up your QuickTime player and go to “file” followed by “New Movie Recording”. By default, the QuickTime player will open up your Mac’s camera.
You can change this by clicking on the drop-down menu beside the record button and change the device.
6) Checking your storage space
Your computer has started to run a little slow as of late. When this happens the cause behind it is usually your storage space.
If you’re not sure how to check disk space on Mac, you’ll be happy to know that it’s pretty straight forward. Click on the Apple logo and go to “About this Mac”. Click on “Storage” and you should be able to see how much space you have left.
You can also use Finder and Disk Utility to see what’s taking up room on your computer as well.
7) Sending huge files
Chances are, the main way you’re going to be communicating with your boss is through email if you work from home. Problems will occur if you try to send a file that’s too large.
The email provider won’t allow it to go through because it’s putting too much of a strain on the servers. You can get around this by sending your message through Apple’s mail app or icloud.com.
When you do this, your file will be uploaded to the Cloud. Your boss will receive a link to the file that will expire after a certain amount of time.
8) Block out all distractions
You sit down to get some work in after finishing up your morning routine. When you do, a bunch of notifications pops up in the corner. Guess you better deal with those before you get started.
Two hours later and you’ve sorted through your notifications but you’ve gotten no work done. To stop this from happening again, set up the “Do Not Disturb” mode in your System Preference menu.
Mac hacks for hard-working moms
Working from home is more than convenient when you’re a mom. It gives you the freedom to take care of your children while also bringing in income.
The problem is that it can be a little hard to stay productive unless you use the best Mac hacks. Keep yourself organized and on track.
Looking for more ways to become productive? Check out our blog daily for more articles like this one.
Photo by Alesia Kazantceva
