Productivity Hack: Get Rid of Visual Clutter

written by Eric J. Ma on 2016-06-30 | tags: productivity

How simple visual decluttering can helped me work more effectively.

For the past few days, I have moved into a default full-screen mode, in which I hid both my dock and my menu bar. (Hiding the menu bar is enabled by going to System Preferences -> General and checking Automatically hide and show the menu bar. This I did without explicitly launching stuff in "full-screen mode", which most Mac apps have the capability for. Not sure why, but I think the little tweak of having the menu bar hidden (though still open) somehow has a large effect. My desktop ends up looking like the following image (by default):

desktop

Additionally, I have started to see the importance of having a single browser tab open, or a single document open, or a single (and logically coherent) set of Python modules open to focus on a single task.

By removing these distracting visual elements out of the way, I can deeply focus on the task at hand instead. No longer will there be a little lingering icon that I'm tempted to click. There's no longer the element of distraction that comes from other "stuff" that's running on my computer.

Cite this blog post:

@article{
    ericmjl-2016-productivity-hack-get-rid-of-visual-clutter,
    author = {Eric J. Ma},
    title = {Productivity Hack: Get Rid of Visual Clutter},
    year = {2016},
    month = {06},
    day = {30},
    howpublished = {\url{https://ericmjl.github.io}},
    journal = {Eric J. Ma's Blog},
    url = {https://ericmjl.github.io/blog/2016/6/30/productivity-hack-get-rid-of-visual-clutter},
}

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