Monday Productivity Pointers

- Hi, I'm Garick Chao and welcome to Monday Productivity Pointers. There may occasionally be times when you want your Mac to shutdown but you won't be there to do it. For example, if you're downloading a file or running a process that you think will take a couple of hours and you're doing this late at night, you might wanna leave your computer on for enough time for the process to complete and then shut itself down. Similarly, it's also useful to have the Mac automatically boot itself up before you get to it in the morning or whenever you need to start work so you don't have to sit through that process, and this is a really simply automation to set up.

I'm gonna go to system preferences into energy saver settings. Now, this is where you can adjust the settings to have your Mac turn off its display after a set amount of time just by moving this slider here. Depending on how old your Mac is, you may also find a computer sleep slider here to manually set the amount of time of inactivity before the computer goes to sleep. On your Macs though, MacOS automatically puts the computer to sleep after the display has been turned off and it determines that the computer isn't doing anything and you won't see that computer sleep slider here, but if you wanna have the computer turn completely off instead of just sleeping, you'll need to set a schedule.

I'll click schedule and that drops down this sheet. So, to schedule my computer to start up from being completely off or to wake it from sleep, I just check this box and then you can specify the days you want your Mac to start up. You can choose weekdays, weekends, every day, or a specific day of the week. So, for example, maybe I want it to start up every weekday at 8:45 a.m., and you can do the same thing with shutting down your computer, and you actually have the choice here of putting it to sleep, restarting it, or shutting it down on a schedule.

Again, maybe you're downloading a file that you know will take about half an hour, you could schedule your computer to shutdown after an hour to be safe and it will do so at the appointed time, or you could just schedule your computer to shutdown every night at a certain time, or you can choose specific days just like the startup schedule. So, maybe, I can shutdown every weekday at 11:45 p.m. Once you've adjusted your settings, click okay and your Mac will follow the schedule you set. Alright, so that does it for this week.

I'm Garick Chao and we'll see you next time for more Monday Productivity Pointers.