as I'm making this video we're not far away from Apple releasing Mac OS Sequoia with all of the productivity enhancements that it's going to come with but I think there are still lots of productivity features in the current version of Mac OS that most Mac owners don't know about so that's what we're going to talk about in this video 10 productivity features of Mac OS Sonoma that I think most Mac owners don't know okay let's get into it in the mail app if you get an email and you want to remember to come back to it later you can rightclick on the email and choose remind me you can then choose to be reminded about it either in an hour's time or at one of two contextual time options like later tonight or tomorrow morning or a custom date and time you would choose that by selecting remind me later when you do this at the agreed time the email will jump to the top of your mail inbox the only problem with this is that you need to be in the mail inbox in order for this to work I think that a better way of remembering to deal with specific emails is to combine the mail app with the reminders app and on the Mac that's really easy you can just use drag and drop for example you can see that I've got my mail inbox open on one side of the screen and my reminders app open on the other I can simply drag any email from mail into the reminders list that I'd like the reminder is created in the reminders app along with a mail icon on the right hand side tapping on that will take me to the specific email in my mail inbox I can then use all the functionality of the reminders app to add things like alerts or anything else that might be useful this also means that this reminder would show on my iPad or my iPhone if I've got those as well you no doubt already know that when you're creating a new event in the calendar you can add a file to it as an attachment but have you tried this you can click into the add alerts repeat or travel time section then click into alert and scroll all the way down and choose custom in here you can change the message with sound dropdown to open file if you choose calendar you can have this work with whatever file you've already attached to your event or if you haven't already attached a file you can instead choose other and then select your file using finder as normal in the section below this you can choose the time that you would like the file to open so for example you might choose at the time of the event or you might say 5 minutes before or something like that click okay then input your event into calendar as you normally would at the time that you chose your file will automatically open on your computer meaning that if you're running into a meeting you'll be ready to go with the file that you need open as soon as the meeting begins without having to search for it and open it manually the common finder window has a bit of a hidden productivity secret you can pin almost anything to it for quick access later all you do is hold command on your keyboard and drag something onto the finder window for example if I've got a document that I use all the time I can press and hold command on my keyboard and then drag and drop that document onto a finder window likewise if there's a specific app that I open all the time I could do exactly the same thing and drag that app onto the finder window too it's then available every time that I'm in finder I can even do it with folders so if there's a folder that you're going to use on a frequent basis this is a really good way of making it easily available to you it even works with locations like external drives so I recently invested in a Nas for the business and all of the files that I use for running my business and now stored on that Naas I'm in and out of it hundreds of times a day I could of course put it in the favorite SP on the menu to the left but I find it much quicker to give it its own dedicated space in the finder window by following the exact same process so that last tip is great for saving your time when you're working on your Mac which brings me nicely to the sponsor of today's video magical AI because that is quite literally what their tool is all about imagine being able to automate all of the repetitive work that you do on your Mac in seconds with a tool that doesn't require a degree in computer science to get it working that's essentially what magicals Nob build automations allow you to do saving users on average 7 hours each week and better yet it's a free Chrome extension that works on any site let me show you how it works let's say that you're pulling data from LinkedIn maybe you're prospecting for your own business or you're job searching and you want to gather together some leads you can open up as many tabs in Chrome as you like and with a couple of button presses all of the important data that you need is transferred into a spreadsheet and it works on any site like LinkedIn Facebook X Instagram Tik Tok even work tools like Salesforce or zenes or maybe you need to transfer a load of data into your CRM endless copy paste right magical AI makes this so much easier you just push a button and let magical do its thing I really like the AI reply feature whether you're responding to emails on Gmail messages on LinkedIn or Whatsapp magical AI can draft personalized replies for you perfect for those situations where you need to send a polite thank you or a quick followup without spending time typing out each message manually if if you're ready to work smarter and not harder download magical AI today by visiting getm magic.com or clicking the link in the description below a common complaint of the system settings menu in your Mac is that it can be hard to find what you want from the options on the left a way to solve this is to Simply rightclick on the system settings option in your doc this will give you an alphabetized list of all the options within system settings you can just click on the one that you want also keep in mind you can search for many of the things that you need in system settings using Spotlight search tap command and the space bar and type whatever it is that you're looking for you can then select it and hit enter to open that exact page in settings if you download an attachment in the mail app when you view that file in finder you'll notice a mail icon next to its name this is finder's way of telling you that this particular file is something that you've received in an email and downloaded as an attachment if you click on that mail icon you'll be taken straight to the email that the file was downloaded from if you write click on the file in finder you'll see that there's a reply option you can click on this to reply to the sender in the original email thread the only slightly annoying thing is I've noticed that the file is attached to your reply but it's easy enough to delete this if you don't want it if you open an image file in the preview app and then go to file and Export you can see that there are a number of different file types that you can choose from to export your image but if you press and hold the option key on your keyboard when you click on the format field you'll see that there are about three times as many image formats that you can choose from now I'll be honest I don't know all of these some of them seem quite obscure to me but if one that you use quite often is in here this is how you would access it by the way if you prefer to have content like this in a written format there's a pdf version of this video complete with screenshots and you can access it along with all other PDFs I've created plus future ones for just $5 a month or by itself as a onetime payment you can either scan the QR code that you can see on screen or follow the link in the description of this video to learn learn more I really like the VIP function in the mail app it allows you to add as many contacts as you like to your VIP list once you've done this VIP contacts will appear in their own dedicated mailbox within the mail app in fact you could take this a step further and go to settings then choose General and in the new message notifications drop- down menu choose VIPs you will now only receive notifications on your Mac when an email from someone in your VIP list comes through to your inbox the this is how I prefer to work I find that getting notifications for every email that lands in my inbox is really distracting but what if you'd still like to know about every email as soon as it arrives but you'd like to be able to distinguish between the VIP ones and the non-vip ones for that you can create a rule in the same mail settings menu click on rules then choose add rule you can leave the top line as it is where it says if any of the following conditions are met then in the from field choose sender is VIP underneath that in the perform the following actions option choose play sound you can then choose from a range of different sounds in this particular list when you're happy with the sound click okay and ensure that the active check boox is ticked next to the rule that you just created now whenever an email from someone in your VIP list lands in your inbox it will play a different sound to an email from a non-vip sender mission control is really useful remember that there are a couple of ways that you can access this you can either press the F3 button on your Mac keyboard or press control and the up Arrow to access it on any keyboard the problem though is Mission Control can get quite messy if you have a lot of different apps open one way to fix this is to go to system settings and choose desktop and doc from the left hand side scroll all the way down to the mission control section and enable the group windows by application toggle this will then group all of the apps together in Mission Control making it much neater if you have a PDF document and you need to redact or black out the text on it the way that most people do this is they open the document in preview tap the pen icon at the top and then either use the draw tool to scribble out the text or tap the shape button and add a square or rectangle that they then fill in with the color black and place over the text there are a couple of problems with this first of all it's really fiddly to try and do it this way but more importantly all you're doing is putting a colored shape on top of text someone with the right photo editing software could potentially make enough changes to the document to access the text that you're trying to cover up the secure way of doing this is to open the document in preview press the pen button at the top to access the markup menu and then press the redact button you can then select the text that you want to redact just like you would in any text editing software and once you save the document anytime you open that document the text will be fully redacted both for you and for anyone else who opens it by default if you're in Safari and you click on a link that link will open open in the current tab that you're viewing replacing whatever it is that you're currently looking at if you'd like the link to open in a new tab alongside what you're currently looking at press and hold the command button on your keyboard when you click the link that link will then open in a new tab in the background allowing you to carry on with what you're doing before you go and view that particular tab then if you get to the point where you've got lots of tabs open and you'd like to move some of those tabs into their own new windows you can either select the specific tab that you want go to window at the top and choose move tab to new window or you can simply drag and drop the tab from the current Safari window into its own new space on your desktop and that will open in a brand new window on the flip side if you end up with lots of safari windows open all over your screen and you want to bring them all together into a collection of tabs within the one window go to the window menu at the top of your screen and choose merge all windows so there you go 10 Mac OS productivity features that I think most Mac owners aren't aware of what do you think anything that should have included in this video that wasn't there 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