there's a few things that I always do when I get a new Mac and I was about to go through them but thought this time i' do it on camera and let's start with finder specifically the sidebar because most of this is stuff that I don't use and we can change that by coming to finder settings sidebar and choosing what we want visible for me I don't want to see tags movies music pictures and none of the iCloud stuff airdrop is also completely pointless to have here and I'll show you why in a minute okay much better now I replace these with my most used folders and these folders are everywhere from external drives like the video I'm currently working on to folders I have in the cloud so let's now fix the folder Windows first I changed the view to list I don't know how people use anything other than this it's way easier to navigate and you can easily see all the important details like file size and date modified I also like date modified to come up first and I shortened the column so that it shows the date in a more simplified format all right so you know when you're deep into multiple subfolders to the point where you're no longer sure where you are we you can fix that by coming here to view and enabling show path bar this also lets you easily move between the different folders and while we're here I also enable the status bar so that I always know the size of the folder I'm in up top we have the toolbar which by default comes with these functions but we can customize them by right clicking and selecting customize toolbar first I get rid of tags and groups cuz I don't use them as well as get info cuz you can get that just as easily by right clicking on a file then I add airdrop so I can just click to air drop a file and and this is why I removed it from the sidebar earlier I also customized the share button by clicking it and then edit extensions and getting rid of all the stuff that I don't use much better and then there's this search box but this searches the entire Mac but if I'm seeing this I definitely want to search this folder and not the entire Mac and we can change this by coming to finder settings Advanced and under when performing a search I change it to search the current folder all right so you know when you're opening a file like a song and it opens up in apple music we can also change that by specifying which app to use for each file type just right click the file get info and under open withth you can choose the app you want to use and then press change all and now every time you open that file type it'll always use the app you just specified okay so by default when you open finder it opens up in recents personally I would rather it open on my documents folder and to change that we just come again to finder settings General and choose which one we want from here the next thing I do is customize the recents folder because there's two two things I don't like about how it's set up by default the first is that it doesn't add folders just files but most of the time I just want to get to a folder I was just in not a specific file and secondly it lists every file you've ever opened so by the time you've had your Mac for a while your list is going to be huge and since the recent folder is just a smart folder we can actually create our own version of it and to do that we just come here to file new smart folder I wanted to search this Mac and then I'm going to press the plus sign and set the last open date to be within 7 days and now it'll show everything we've opened in the past week and I don't want it to show any apps here so I'm going to press the option key and you see the plus sign turns into three dots I'm going to press it and select none of the following are true kind is applications and that's it now I'm going to save and name it recents toggle on the option t to the sidebar and remove the old version so I've never been big on wallpapers cuz honestly I just never used to see them I was always going from one window to to the other so there was never reason to see my desktop but that all changed with the new widgets because now you can actually add widgets to the desktop and not just the widgets on the Mac but also any widget you have access to on your iPhone so if I right click anywhere on the desktop and click widgets it'll show up a bunch of widgets from apps installed on my Mac and on my iPhone and the best part is that a lot of these are interactive so let's start with the first one I use which is my calendar I use Fantastical but there's also one for the stock calendar app I'm going to pick this one here and because Fantastical widgets are interactive I can just press on different days and see what I have going on in that day I can also move it around and even adjust the size then I have my homekit folder to run different scenes and this is also interactive so I can immediately see what's going on around the house like what lights are on and if I want to I can turn them off from here the same goes for the garage door I also have the weather widget as well as a battery widget to keep track of my airpods and my Mouse's battery and lastly I have a folder for the shortcuts I use on the Mac I have a full video coming on these so make sure you're subscribed and now I can just spread up with my thumb and three fingers to go to my desktop and see all I have going on this basically gives a whole other level of functionality to the desktop and when you open up an app you see that the widgets turn monochrome they are only colored when you're on the desktop but if you want to always keep them in either monochrome or in colar you can do that by coming to system settings desktop and dock scroll down to widgets and choose from this drop down menu for me I like to have them change automatically and then for those widgets that I still want to see but not every time I just put them in the control center here on the right and for me that's just a widget from this app called parcel that shows when my deliveries are coming and to keep the desktop always clean I go under finder settings and uncheck these options here so that every time I plug an external drive I don't see them on the desktop and while we're on the topic of keeping things tidy one tool that does just that is the sponsor of today's video clean my Mac X when I'm done with the video my Mac is a mess it has b-roll and massive files as well as screenshots and Screen recordings everywhere this is where clean my Mac X comes in it starts with a smart scan that does cleanup mware removal and speeds up your Mac all in just a couple of seconds then it has space lens that helps me see what's taking up space on my Mac and I can then decide decide what to keep and remove and it also has a ton of useful maintenance tools like the app updator that lets me easily update every app on my Mac even the ones that are not in the Apple store or if I no longer use an app I can use the uninstaller to uninstall it the right way without leaving any trace of unwanted Library files clean my Mac X lets me focus on producing more while embracing the mess you can get a 7-Day free trial and 20% off by using my code from Sergio or by using the link in the description so let's now move on to the dock and the first thing I do is I get rid of all the apps and I adjust the size then we can rightclick the dock to go to the doc settings and I actually prefer it on the bottom I know it's technically smarter to have it on the sides to maximize the vertical space since we have less of it but I just can't get used to it then I change the way apps are minimized from the genie effect to scale this gets rid of the animation and makes it snappier also you know how when you minimize an app it takes up a new space on the dock if you're like me and don't want that you can change it here by toggling on minimize Windows into application icon and now every time I minimize a window it'll go inside the apps icon instead of cluttering the dock I also toggle off the option to show suggested and recent applications as otherwise they won't leave the dock when you quit them all right so if we scroll to the bottom we have hot Corners this is a feature that lets you hover to the corners of your screen to toggle on different actions so if you set your bottom right Hot Corner to be a quick note then every time you move your cursor to the bottom right you'll trigger a quick note but a lot of people get frustrated with this because it's easy to accidentally trigger a function and to get around that you can actually bind modifier keys on your keyboard so that a function only gets triggered when you hover to the corner while holding a specific modifier key and to do this you just hold a modifier key like command or option when you're choosing a function for me I use command and the only hog corner I use is quick notes on the bottom right so let's now move on to the menu bar and the only change I think is an absolute must is to show the battery percentage and you can do that under system settings control center battery and then turn on show percentage I have no idea why this isn't turned on by default and if we scroll up we can customize what's on there for me I add Bluetooth and I remove the spotlight search all right so in the trackpad settings I increase the default speed cuz just way too slow and I toggle on tap to click which honestly should just be on by default then I come here to scroll and zoom and I toggle off Natural scrolling if you leave it on when you swipe down on the trackpad the screen goes up if we turn it off the screen moves in the same direction as you swipe which feels much more natural to me the last thing I change on the trackpad is under accessibility pointer control and then trackpad options and that's to enable use trackpad for dragging and change the dragging style to three-finger drag and now I can move Windows around by just dragging in with three fingers on the trackpad so let's now move on to system settings and the first thing I do is customize the spotlight search and I don't mean installing a replacement but rather what you want Spotlight to index because by default it'll show you everything including stuff you'll likely never use like code headers tips and Json files but thankfully we can customize it by coming here to settings ser and Spotlight and now we can toggle off what we don't want to be indexed this not only makes finding easier but makes it snappier too cuz it doesn't have to index a bunch of useless stuff and by the way this affects Spotlight Replacements like Alfred and raycast as well all right so if you have an Apple Watch you definitely want to set it to be used for password unlocking you can do this under Touch ID and password and then at the bottom you'll see an option to toggle on your Apple watch now every time you open up your Mac while you're wearing your Apple watch it'll automatically unlock and while we're here depending on what I'm doing it is sometimes easier to use Touch ID with a different finger or even a different hand so I add multiple fingerprints here and if you have multiple people using your Mac you can add their fingerprints here as well also I frequently connect to my network via an ethernet cable and if you do that as well then you definitely want to prioritize that over Wi-Fi and to do that just go to network settings right click to set service order and place your ethernet connection on top all right so I'm okay with auto correct on the phone but not on the Mac and to turn it off we just come here to system settings keyboard and edit your input sources for me I turn all of these off but the full stop after double space and by default the Mac goes to sleep in 2 minutes which is just way too quick for me so I change this to 20 and I toggle off show username and photo and there's a couple things I change in the display settings I don't like to have it automatically adjust brightness and I turn off true tone I do a lot of video editing in Photoshop so I need the colors to be as accurate as possible and if you work a lot at night like I do then you're definitely going to want to enable night shift which automatically makes your screen warmer when it's nighttime but if you want more control over it I definitely recommend flux instead which is one of those apps I install right away that drastically improve my Mac experience and there's a ton more of these apps but they deserve their own video which is exactly what I did and you can find it right here so I'll see you there