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After months of working remotely, we may be getting used to engaging with our jobs, schools, and social lives through our computers—but are we using these powerful machines to their full capacity? Today’s post comes from CATLab member Jordan Douthit, who, as both a coder and a creative, has picked up some tips and tricks to make remote work easier, no matter what project you’re working on!

Since we have been working from home for some time now, I have picked up a few tips and tricks that make doing so just a little easier. Here are just a few things that you can be doing to make your work time more effective and easier to manage. These tips are mostly geared towards Mac users, but a lot work for PC and Windows products as well!

1. Split Screen

When working on transferring information, it gets incredibly inconvenient flipping back and forth between documents. Luckily, Chrome (and Apple) understood this problem and created ways around it. 

• (for Mac) Go to the page you want to see, hold down on the green bubble in the top left corner, and while holding down, drag the window to whichever side you want. Then click on the other page you want to see and it will automatically populate the other side of your screen! Drag the bar in the middle to make one side bigger or smaller as well
• (for PC) For PC, it’s similar: drag your tab or window to the side until your cursor hits the edge of your screen. When you let go, the window will fill that side of the screen and then you can choose the other page.

If you want something other than a 50-50 split, you can click on the line in the middle and slide it back and forth to create the ratio you want. 

2. Tab Resizing

If you would rather have more control over how your window resizes and orientation of your browsers, you can use Tab Resize—a Google Chrome plugin (which works for both Mac and PC!). It gives you more flexibility when it comes to viewing pages, and I use it when I am transferring data from one or two sources into a single document. 

•  If you are using Chrome, look up the tab resize plugin (pictured):

​Simply download this plugin and it will appear in the top right corner of the browser

3. F.lux

This plugin is awesome—it helps with the blue light on your screen and tones your screen without glasses! It also knows what time of day it is and adjusts to less blue light later in the evening. It works with Windows 10 too!

Simply look up f.lux and download!

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4. Do Not Disturb Setting 

If you want to disable notifications for your Mac, you can do so quickly by: 

• Holding down the Option button on your keyboard
• Select the Notification Center icon in the Menu Bar and it’ll shade itself out, signaling that Do Not Disturb is turned on!
• For Windows, just click on the notification manager at the bottom right and enable Focus Assist. Just like Do Not Disturb, this setting prevents notifications from distracting you while you work.

5. See Your Desktop 

• If you want to see your desktop without closing any windows, just do a 4-finger outward swipe motion on your trackpad (like your fingers are a firework). All your open windows will go to the outer edges of your screen and you can see your desktop.

Similarly, if you want to see all of your tabs open, you can do a 3-finger swipe up or click the F3 button at the top of your keyboard.

6. Multiple Desktops 

Something I use to keep track of multiple projects is multiple desktops. Either by clicking F3 or by doing 3-finger slide up, you will see something like this:

• At the very top is a grayed out area that most likely says Desktop 1. Clicking the plus sign will bring in another desktop and you can freely use that to add another Chrome browser or whatever work you would like to do. (I use multiple desktops to keep work and school separate).
• You can also access these desktops by clicking on them in the bar at the top or by 3-finger sliding to the side of your trackpad.

7. Use Incremental Volume Adjustment

• Hold down Option + Shift and then your volume button up or down and it’ll incrementally adjust the volume 
• You can do the same with brightness! 

8. Open Spotlight search instantly

• Hit command + spacebar! 
• Super easy and helpful for finding things quickly

These are just some of the things I have picked up from working remotely, but as we continue on working from home I have picked up some other, less technical tips as well. Some other things that we should be doing (not computer related) would be: taking breaks from staring at your screen, going for walks, and fixing your posture every once in a while (this is truly the best tip out of all of them). Since we are working from home it is so easy to just continuously work; there are no cues to you that your space has changed (like leaving an office), so finding that balance between screen time and me time is very important. Hopefully these tips help ease the struggles of WFH and help make your work time more efficient and enjoyable so that you can spend more time away from your computer.

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