If you’re like most people, you probably spend a lot of time on your computer. But with so many windows and tabs open, it can be hard to find the time to do what you really want to do: work. To save time, use “hot corners” on your Mac. A hot corner is a spot on your screen where you can drag and drop items to make quick work of tasks. Here are four tips for using hot corners to save time:

  1. Use the Desktop as a Hot Corner for Your Documents: If you have a lot of documents open, use the Desktop as your hot corner for easy access. Just drag and drop any document onto the Desktop so that it becomes an icon in the Dock. You can then click on this icon to open the document quickly.
  2. Use the Menu Bar as a Hot Corner for Your Web Browser: If you need to go online but don’t have time to search through all your browser tabs, use the Menu Bar as your hot corner. Just drag and drop any website into the Menu Bar so that it becomes an icon in the Dock. You can then click on this icon to open the website quickly without having to search through all your tabs first.
  3. Use Quick Launch Icons as Hot Corners for Your Applications: If you have a lot of applications installed, use Quick Launch icons as your hot corners for quick access. Just drag and drop any application into one of these icons so that it becomes an icon in the Dock. You can then click on this icon to launch the application quickly without having to search through all its folders first ..

Hot Corners are one of macOS’s unheralded features. You may use a Mac every day and not even know hot corners exist, but they’re handy: with them, you can mouse over any corner of your screen to instantly activate routine functions, like the screensaver, launchpad, or showing the desktop.

Hot corners might sound familiar to you if you’ve ever set up and used screen savers on your Mac. For some reason, the only way to access this function is in the Screen Saver preference pane, even though you can do much more than activate the screen saver.

To assign functions to all, a couple, or just one your screen corners, open System Preferences and then click the “Desktop & Screen Saver” preferences.

Make sure you’re on the Screen Saver tab, and then click on the “Hot Corners” button.

In the following example, we’ve set up the screen saver to activate in the top-left corner and the Desktop will show when we place the pointer in the bottom-left corner.

This is really convenient, but it can also cause problems. If you’re even a little bit overzealous with your mouse movement, you’ll invoke the screen saver every time you accidentally put your mouse in the upper left corner. You don’t want to start the screen saver when you want to just open the Apple menu, that kind get pretty tedious.

Luckily, you can add modifier keys to make hot corners a bit less sensitive. When you click to select a corner, press your desired modifier keys–for example, Shift and Command–and then click on the function. For example, in the menu above, we’d have to use Shift+Command to activate whatever we assign to that corner.

If we decide to activate Launchpad, we need to press Shift+Command and then move the pointer to the bottom-right corner.

You can use whatever modifier keys you want and as many as you want, and each corner can be different.

With this, our corners all have their assignments and to make it harder to accidentally trigger anything. We just went ahead and gave everything Command-key modifiers.

Even if you don’t want to assign every corner a different function, you can at least have fast access to a few things, such as triggering the screen saver or showing the Desktop.

RELATED: How to Enable and Configure Screen Savers on a Mac

This is especially helpful if you use a Mac desktop with a non-Apple keyboard and also don’t have the luxury of using a trackpad, with which you can use finger gestures to trigger many of these hot corner functions.