Background Zen

As I write this I have two fold­ers on my com­puter that con­tain desk­top back­grounds (wall­pa­pers) that I have col­lected from var­i­ous places online, total­ing 165 dif­fer­ent back­grounds to choose from. So what do I do? I have been talk­ing a lot on this blog about some­thing I call Desk­top Zen. Cre­at­ing a com­put­ing envi­ron­ment that is relax­ing and con­ducive to cre­ativ­ity and work­ing. Of those 165 back­ground pic­tures (some... Read More

Clutter Distracts. A Blank Page Inspires.

The same is true with a clut­ter free desk. I have on occa­sion writ­ten about clean­li­ness, clear desks, desk­top zen and your envi­ron­ment in gen­eral and how it can effect your pro­duc­tiv­ity. I have shared what my desk looks like a few times now, and each time you can see that I strive to keep it mostly empty. I have had com­ments from peo­ple who just don’t under­stand make com­ments about the way my desk and office appear. They often joke that I must... Read More

Hiding Wires for a Clear Desktop

Since I have started com­puter with a lap­top I have become accus­tomed to hav­ing many periph­er­als that need to plug into it on a reg­u­lar basis. There has always been a plethora of cords that reside on my desk and a few exter­nal hard dri­ves. This of course means clut­ter and lots of wires. I spent some­time star­ing at my desk last night and came up with what I thought would be a pretty clever solu­tion. Tak­ing my desk from this: With cords and wires... Read More

DAVE Laptop Stand From IKEA

found this DAVE lap­top stand for $17.99 (that is right less than $20) and brought it home. This is a great lit­tle stand, that she can use while sit­ting on the couch, or a stool. It tucks away nicely into an unused cor­ner of our liv­ing room. Best of all I no longer trip over cords. If you need a quick and easy lap­top desk, check out the DAVE from IKEA.  Read More

Alone Time

We are all more pro­duc­tive alone then when oth­ers are around us, focus on how we can lever­age that to become more pro­duc­tive is key. I want to first touch on what I mean by around us when I am refer­ring to people. I do not mean ran­dom strangers in a cof­fee shop, or other peo­ple in the room. I am refer­ring to indi­vid­u­als that you may have to inter­act with at some point. More specif­i­cally those around you that will need or want to inter­act with you. Look... Read More

Constraints for Creativities Sake

Hence the title of this post, that con­straints lead to creativity. Per­haps the best way to describe this (that I can think of) is to think of your­self lost in the woods. You need to build a shel­ter to stay in that night, and all you have with you is your clothes and a knife. Now I am sure that more than a few of you have seen the sur­vival shows, or built a fort when you were a kid. For those of you who have not, when it comes down to it you start to take branches... Read More

Be Simple

Over the past two months I have be work­ing at sim­pli­fy­ing my life. From the pro­grams I use on my com­puter, to what is in my junk drawer. Purg­ing all excess from my life, even in areas that I pre­vi­ously thought it would not matter. Grow­ing up I always thought that you could not have too much of a good thing, let alone a great thing. I thought this way right up until the point I got sick from eat­ing too much hal­loween candy. Even still, I thought that per­haps... Read More

Time-Free Computing

Min­i­mal Mac web­site since it started up. He has posted a ton of tips on the site for sim­pli­fy­ing the look and feel of your Mac. One of the largest changes I have made thanks to this site, is remov­ing menubar icons, as I wrote about last week. The largest of those removals was get­ting rid of the clock. This has been one of the sin­gle great­est and most pro­duc­tive changes that I have made, since I started using OmniFocus. Com­put­ing with­out a Clock Read... Read More

A Writing Environment

Cre­at­ing the per­fect writ­ing envi­ron­ment can be one of the hard­est things for a per­son to do. I per­son­ally need a ster­ile, mod­ern feel­ing envi­ron­ment. Clut­ter, in any way is a com­plete dis­trac­tion, and clocks are the worst. So to cre­ate a great writ­ing envi­ron­ment for your­self you need to start by fig­ur­ing out what type of envi­ron­ment you are most com­fort­able in and then cre­ate that envi­ron­ment, while mak­ing... Read More

Virtual Desktops: Eliminate Distractions

So far I have talked about using screen mask­ing to block out dis­trac­tions and using fullscreen writ­ing pro­grams that help to do the same thing. Both are excel­lent ways to keep your com­put­ing process stream­lined. Yet another way to do this is to use mul­ti­ple vir­tual desk­tops. Apples come with a built-in pro­gram called Spaces that allows you to do just that, and for Win­dows take a look at Vir­tu­aWin. The ben­e­fits to using mul­ti­ple desk­tops are: Keeps... Read More