Sometimes when we are working on a project so hard that we lose the track of time. And before we realize, it is already very late into the night. So we have to forget about the dinner and catch a few hours of sleep so that we can start early next morning.
Fortunately, macOS has a useful feature built inside it using which we can always keep ourselves reminded of the current time. We can configure Mac to announce the current time at every hour, every half an hour or at every fifteen minutes. Here is how it is done:
- Click on the Apple logo near the top-left corner and select System Preferences from there.
- Select Date & Time from system preferences window.
- Select Clock tab from the window that opens up.
- Click on the small lock icon to make changes. You have to enter administrator password to continue.
- Select the checkbox Announce the time. We can choose the announcement frequency from “on the hour”, “on the half hour”, or “on the quarter hour”.
- If you want, you can choose the voice used for the announcement and customize it. It comes with only one voice “Daniel” but we can install more voices very easily.
- Now you can click on the small lock to prevent anymore changes and close all the open windows.
Once you have set your Mac to announce the time, it will announce the time in the voice selected by you at the frequency that you have picked. If you get tired of listening to the time announcements after a few days, you can repeats all the same steps and uncheck the checkbox “Announce the time” in step 5 above in order to disable this feature.
Personally I found the time announcement feature in macOS very useful when preparing for examinations. It can announce the time every hour while you are busy answering the questions. By racing against the clock, we can prepare ourselves to answer the questions much faster.