Avoid Distractions: Keep Your Desktop Clean

For some time now, my MacBook Pro’s desktop is totally black. There’s nothing on it. No Dock, no menu bar, no hard drives or inserted CD’s, and most important of all: no files and folders.

Two years ago Merlin Mann and Leo Laporte discussed the ‘Undistracted Mac‘ on MacBreak. The Undistracted Mac basically means you hide away as much unnecessary items from your screen as possible so you’ll not get distracted by anything on your Mac except for what you’re doing right now.

Information overload?

There’s a huge amount of information coming to us every day, from various sources. Email, SMS, Twitter, RSS, IM, next to the more traditional telephone, can keep you busy all day. It’s very important to streamline these flows of information, and to keep control of it. If we have all those things checking for new messages and notifying us all day we won’t have a single minute to work on what’s really important.

Applications like Growl can be very helpful, sending visual notifications of what’s happening on your computer, but be careful with it, those little messages in the corner of your screen can easily distract you, especially when you’re using something like Twitterrific and you get a message every few minutes.

Once we’ve taken care of the information overload it’s time to focus. We can make this a little easier by eliminating as much visual distractions as possible. We can hide the applications we’re not using and hide the dock manually, but what can we do to automate this and get an even cleaner desktop?

I don’t need the Dock!

Let’s see if the methods Merlin explained are still applicable two years later. First of all I don’t use the Dock. As I’m an avid Quicksilver user, I never use the Dock to open an application, so I don’t keep any icons in it, it basically stays hidden all the time.

A lot of the things Merlin used are now combined in one nice application: Desktopple Pro by FoggyNoggin Software. It can hide the icons of your desktop (like Backdrop), it can automatically hide other applications for you (like Spirited Away), and it can hide the menu bar (like MenuShade). So there’s no need to run those tools separately, Desktopple will take care of it all.

Don’t hide the mess, clean it up

I like Desktopple very much, although I don’t use it’s main feature: covering up the mess on the desktop. I don’t like to have anything on my desktop at all. And frequent readers of Streamlined Mind know how I solve this: Hazel is doing the work for me.

Whenever a file arrives on my desktop, Hazel sends it away. It can be configured to send movie files to the Movies folder, music files to the Music folder et cetera. When files are sitting in the Trash for more than a week, Hazel deletes them for me, and when I move an application to the Trash, Hazel throws away the application’s support files too.

Finally, I changed the background color for my desktop to black. Black is not a standard color in the Desktop & Screen Saver preferences, so I made a completely black image file myself. Not very hard, you can just capture a part of the screen using Option+Shift+4. You could also use white if you prefer, although you’ll still see the shadow beneath the menu bar if Desktopple hides it for you.

Was this article helpful to you? What does your desktop look like? Please tell me by leaving a comment!