How did it come to this?
Clutter. So Sad.
I had such good intentions.
And that new widescreen cinema display.
All for nothing.
exaggerated sigh
Ok, this is only a simulated mess. Many of you who saw my last screencast saw what my current desktop looks like:
No clutter. Blissful state of order.
But my desktop used to be cluttered all the time. Why? I’d be in a rush and so would save things on the desktop “just this once” knowing that I couldn’t miss them that way and could always file them later. I’m sure you’ve spotted the many errors in judgement in that example. If it isn’t already painfully obvious from personal experience, you can still miss things saved on your desktop, particularly after you’ve saved about a hundred things there.
It’s not just bad habits like that which cause desktop clutter. A lot of apps make it harder to keep the desktop clean by dumping files there. Most browsers will use the desktop as the default download folder. Bad bad bad.
So how to get from cluttered to clean? Five steps. Here they are:
- Part 1: The No-Mercy Cleanup
- Part 2. Fight Desktop Entropy
- Part 3. Aesthetic Computing and Usability
- Part 4. Capture and access easily
- Part 5. Cruelty can be kind
Windows users, you’ll find items 1 and 2 relevant but the rest are mac specific. Hey, 2 out of 5 ain’t bad! Switch to Mac, get all 5…
This whole process is easy. It’s “off the shelf” and very likely similar to what a lot of you have also discovered works. If you are already doing something similar, please share your own tips and techniques in the comments as each part gets published.
Those of you that asked for more information about the icons I have on my desktop (as seen in my previous screencast) will find their purpose, use and method of customization in this series.
Comments
Re: Five Steps to a Kinkless Desktop
You’re psychic Ethan! I’m just about to launch into the OmniFocus alpha, so I watched your screencasts last nite. I was very intrigued with your desktop setup. It looks perfectly tailored for encouraging instant processing. I intended to write you today to ask you about your system. I logged in today to discover this new series.
thanks Jon
Re: Five Steps to a Kinkless Desktop
Jon, once I work through the whole series, I’d welcome comments and feedback on the efficiency of the system. I have some other methods that I haven’t included in the series yet for tweaking it for even greater speed and ease of use, but I didn’t want to overwhelm with a 10 part series ;)
Re: Five Steps to a Kinkless Desktop
Yes, Indeed you are! I had just found the agua-icons on iconfactory, and mimicked your desktop-setup, when I found this in my feed. Excellent, now I can set it up properly.
Re: Five Steps to a Kinkless Desktop
I have yet to read all of the parts of this series, but just wanted to say how much the glimpse of your desktop in the OmniFocus screencast inspired me.
I’m currently down to two folders on my desktop, “@Inbox” and “Current Projects”
Current Projects is my “Next Actions” and Review phase in one. Files are grouped into their own folder with a descriptive title —“PDFs to print out”, “Files for product demonstration”, etc.
The desktop icons are sized 96x96 to nudge me into making sure that I will not let extra icons hang out on the desktop for too long. I placed a link to @Inbox in my Finder sidebar, and redirected all of my download folder locations to @Inbox as well.
Looking forward to reading the series!
Re: Five Steps to a Kinkless Desktop
Must be something in the air, as I’ve tackled the same subject at approximately the same time, only with a different approach
really now, it’s not spam nor self-promotion, I’m just amazed at how similar ideas float in the air….
Re: Five Steps to a Kinkless Desktop
it’s not kinkless nor omnifocus but it works to clean my own desktop that has just the same incline to overfill, and what I use is “Chaos Antidode” - cheap but extremly useful to me, after setting up once, I just run it (open via QuickSilver, and it’s quite fast) and it files everything away to it’s correct folder, and the ‘everything else’ folder gets filled what does not fit the bill and 1x a month a scan of that folder clears also that.
sometimes, when writing down what should be done gets in my way, it’s just esier to do it and have it done.
Side question: DevonThink Pro and Scrivener?
A life saver! I have been using your organizational techniques and I am very happy with them. A BIG thank you! I just have one side question: I am very interested in going further with my organization using DevonThink Pro (love the idea of transportable database files). I am also doing research for writing and Scrivener looks great. But isn’t Scrivener redundant when you have DevonThink Pro? How do you use them together? (for example, they both gather meta information, documents etc…)
Thanks, Regis
Re: Five Steps to a Kinkless Desktop
Excellent writeup Ethan, I’m in the process of adopting this technique, as well as setting up an archive such as the one in your screencast (supplemented by DEVONthink). I was curious, would it be possible to see a screenshot of your archive, with all the fields open? that is to say, all the sub-categories showing. The reason I’d like to see this, is you seem to have developed a pretty slick and efficient archive structure, and I would love to see your folder structure, so I can use that to create my own archive. Just as a reference :). You can email it to me at joekunin [at] gmail [dot] com if that is easier for you.
Thanks, Ethan!
-Joey
Re: Five Steps to a Kinkless Desktop
Leopard seems to take care of it… Stacks.
kinkless sitedesign is in err.
your body width is wayyyyyy to wide.
standard screen size is 1024 pixels x 768 pixels.
use this on your body to standardise 1em = 10pixels.
use this on your canvas element(the first and only child element of the body) element for centering:
these can also be put in your drupal styles.css which would be under :
and this is how you woul put it in :
find and modify the body class to include the following css attributes :
body,html > body{ font-size:10px; font-family:sans-serif; padding:0; margin:0; }
find and modify the className for the hypothetical first-only-child of the body( i call mine canvas)
.canvas{ width:72em; margin:0 auto; }
Re: Five Steps to a Kinkless Desktop
Great article. Where do you keep your archive folder? Root? And what goes in your Infrastructure folder? thanks
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