Here’s a handy little tip if you shut down your Mac with the options in the Apple Menu.
Typically, when you choose Restart or Shut Down from these menu options, you’ll get a dialog box that checks to see if you’re absolutely, positively sure you meant to choose the menu option that you just…chose…sigh.
In the future, if you’d like to skip this redundancy, hold the Option key when you choose either Shut Down or Restart. When you do so, you’ll notice the little ellipses disappear from after each of those menu options. These three little dots let you know there will be an extra dialog coming, and they’re all over OS X.
Pressing the Option key will remove those dots, and more importantly keep you from having to confirm a choice that you definitely do want. Awesome.