Editor’s Note: This tutorial was written and demonstrated for OS X Lion 10.7.

‘Resume’ was one of the most compelling features that was brought to OS X Lion, and allows you to automatically reopen every window you had open before you closed an application. The idea is to save time and increase productivity when you relaunch an application. For example, when you’re browsing with Safari, Resume will save which windows you last had open. Or when you’re typing in Word, relaunching the app will open all your previously-open documents.

However, occasionally Resume can get in the way. Sometimes, we really want to just close all of our tabs, or windows, or whatever, and not have them reopen. Here’s an extremely simple solution: just hold down the Option key when you’re quitting the app. This will allow you to use the Quit and Discard Windows functionality, which, as the name says, quits your app, and discards the currently open windows.

That’s it!