GTD 2006.26: Clear your desktop, clear your mind

This is one of the weirder Getting Things Done tips, but it works. Is your PC desktop a mass of file icons? Every time you see your PC desktop sees all those visual references, some part of your brain tries to process, sort, evaluate them, whether you planned to do this or not.

Humans are hardwired to process quickly what they see: is it a threat or lunch or something I don’t care about? Whether it's a carnivore-like shadow in the trees or the shadow of some downloaded attachment from Outlook, our brains are going to process this first (or there might not be a second chance). What’s more, we will keep doing this as long as these visual cues remain unclassified.

At best, it's visual static. At worse, you get locked into a habit of distraction that wastes time.

So stop: make a folder and dump all those loose desktop files into it. Call it 2006, or Jan 2006 or Week 5, or whatever. Now, as far as the part of your brain that’s in charge of making threat/food assessments, you’re done.

If the above sounds silly to you, and you don’t think having an icon-laden desktop means anything, try it for a day and see if you’re stress level doesn’t ratchet down a notch or two. You can always go back to what you had.

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Comments

[Justin Smith]

Bob, I used to do this all the time. Every month or so I'd create a new "Untitled Folder" and dump everything on my desktop in it. Of course, after a couple weeks I'd have a mess again so I'd create a new "Untitled Folder" and drop everything in that including the last "Untitled Folder". It all worked reasonably well for about eight years.

Unfortunately, I was constantly having to do searches to find things I knew had to be somewhere deeply nested in all those folders. Worse, my hard drive slowly filled up. Finding things to throw away always left me with the uneasy feeling that something important was going to be lost.

After reading GTD I built a new system (see URL) that is really helping.