I had an ulterior motive for that last post. I needed to write it to clear an email out of my Inbox, resulting in a clean Inbox for Mail, and a clean Inbox for my Desktop. (I do have some stuff in my physical Inbox right now but that's because I process it on Mondays when Kinkless GTD tells me to. It's mostly filing.)
I wanted to recommend the articles over at Kinkless on the "kinkless desktop". They are sort of Mac-centric in terms of the specific software recommendations but the general philosophy of "Stop treating your Desktop as a dumping grounds - and stop letting software do it as well." is applicable to Windows as well. One of the ironies for me is that my desktop was reasonably clean but reading this article lead to me downloading a bunch of software, and I didn't have time to process it all until today. So my new Desktop Inbox was stuffed with software - to streamline and/or prettify my Inbox. (sigh) But it's a great series of articles, and I highly recommend it.
If nothing else the suggestion of having a folder called "Pending" on your Desktop is brilliance. Part of the clutter I did have was little test files coming up or down from the web server as I worked on various import/export mechanisms. But once I had four or more of those on my desktop, then a couple of songs (downloaded legally from TMBG.com, thankyouverymuch. Stay away RIAA), then a program or two to install later and . . . chaos. And as I mounted and unmounted removable discs and networks shares I'd have weird gaps left in the desktop, so three files downloaded consecutively wouldn't even be congruent. (That suggestion to NOT show mounted shares and drives on the Desktop is also a great idea. Leave 'em in the Finder!)
My desktop has officially Gotten Things Done(tm). David Allen would be proud :-)
technorati tags:GTD, Kinkless, Desktop, InboxZero
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