The Desktop

Someone recently saw my Desktop and asking me how the heck I keep it so empty! I thought it’s something worth sharing. Many people do it but many more don’t.

A desktop, to me, is a temporary workspace. Anything that goes on it comes off a few days later. Any work that takes longer than that really needs to go into it’s own appropriate project folder and worked off there. That’s the first thing I see when I login so it serves as a reminder too.

I use a 7 day temporary duration. So anything that I do in the next 7 days sits on my desktop. Anything older is either deleted, or if it’s worth preserving, moved to an appropriate folder.

If there is a PDF I stumble across but don’t have time to read, I dump it onto the Desktop. If there is a link to an interesting site I want to check out later, I make a shortcut on the desktop to it. If I’m working on an article or uploading files, they come into the Desktop, finish their job and prompty get into Trash.

There was a time when I had four folders on the Desktop into which each of these temporary things gets sorted into — Links, To read, Projects, Todos. Links only contained shortcuts to sites I wanted to check out later. To read had downloaded PDFs, DOCs, HTMs, etc. Projects had the other stuff which I temporarily work on, upload and delete — especially Employer related stuff! The Todos folder usually had text files like To email, Office to do, Home to do, etc. Just a small list of things that I ought to get done. I ditched this method a while back to get myself to a state where working toward an empty desktop would be a good thing! I’ve also created a simple tool that sits in my taskbar and does nothing but store Todos. Works well enough for me and I intend to release this as soon as I get some time.