How can I quickly put my Mac to sleep?

The good news, before you bemoan the energy inefficiency of your cute little Mac, is that you can quickly signal to your Mac that it should chill for a little while with just the touch of a few keys or the flick of the mouse. In fact, there are a couple of ways to accomplish this.

If your Mac has an Eject button toward the upper right, just above the Delete key, then you can use one of many keyboard shortcuts to tell your Mac to Shut Down, Sleep or maybe just put the display to sleep.

The most comprehensive of these commands is the Ctrl+Eject combination. This will bring up a quick dialog with all major options: Restart, Sleep and Shut Down. But it also requires that you then use your mouse to navigate to the button and press it.

Fortunately, there are more direct shortcuts. Ctrl+Command+Eject will put your Mac right to sleep. This is probably the most useful of them all, as your are instantly saving as much power as you can, while still only a few seconds away from waking your Mac back up by pressing any key and getting right back to work.

Ctrl+Option+Command+Eject will go all the way by shutting down your Mac. Of course, that assumes that all running applications will gracefully quit. If, for instance, you have an unsaved document in one application, you will be prompted to save it first, which could make this shortcut a much longer task in reality. You can also Ctrl+Command+Eject to restart.

A very handy shortcut is Shift+Ctrl+Eject. This one will shut down your display only. So you are saving power, but your Mac is still available on the network to share files and such. It is also very quick to wake up from this display sleep, leaving you no excuse to not use this when walking away from your desk for even a minute. Not only will it save power, but it will increase the life of your display too.

Looking for a mouse action instead of a keyboard shortcut? You can do that through your Mac's System Preferences in the Apple menu. Assuming you are using Snow Leopard, go to the Expose & Spaces preferences, and click on Expose. In addition to Expose's own preferences, this window contains the Active Screen Corners preferences.

Set one of the corners to use Put Display to Sleep. Now, when you move your cursor into that corner and wait a second, your display will turn off. So when you go to walk away from your desk, you can put your display to sleep by just flicking your mouse down and to the left all the way.