How to Create A Minimalist Computer Experience

my desk­top– as of june 20, 2009

I’ve done this myself so I know this works and I know how help­ful it is to have a min­i­mal­ist computer/laptop when you want to be productive.

I myself have an unclut­tered lap­top (see pic­ture), with three fold­ers: 1 INBOX, 2 MITS (or Most Impor­tant Tasks) and 3 WP (or Word­Press for all my blog­ging related activ­i­ties). The expla­na­tion of how to use this is dis­cussed below. I have also added my own comments.

This is from Zen Habit’s Leo Babauta. Read and try to do this yourself.

By Leo Babauta

A min­i­mal­ist com­puter setup, as para­dox­i­cal as that may sound to some, lends itself to a more serene, focused cre­ative envi­ron­ment in my experience.

I love a clean desk­top, a friction-free inter­face, and sim­ple tools that help me focus on what I really need to get done: to cre­ate, with­out distractions.

And when I gaze lov­ingly at my icon-less desk­top, I sigh with con­tent­ment. I really love simplicity.

If this kind of min­i­mal­ist expe­ri­ence appeals to you (and it won’t appeal to every­one), read on for my sug­ges­tions for cre­at­ing this setup.

An Unclut­tered Desk­top

I don’t have any icons on my com­puter desk­top — I’ve had the expe­ri­ence of hav­ing a thou­sand icons on the desk­top and it really doesn’t com­pare to an unclut­tered envi­ron­ment. Sure, it may be easy to just double-click on a fre­quently used app or doc­u­ment (although that’s not as fast as what I sug­gest under the “Inter­face” sec­tion below). But hav­ing to look at so many icons is visual stress and dis­trac­tion, so I’ve ban­ished this method of working.

Now, I have zero icons on the desk­top and I usu­ally choose a fairly min­i­mal­ist (but beau­ti­ful) desk­top pic to com­plete the experience.

I also went to the extent of hav­ing ZERO icons/folders on my desk­top before. But the method here is really a more “productive-friendly” set-up.

Here’s what to do:

1. Put all icons on your desk­top into a folder. You could put them into a “Temp” folder for sort­ing later, or cre­ate two fold­ers and sort them quickly: “Work­ing” and “Archives”. Work­ing is for stuff you’re work­ing on right now, and Archives is for every­thing else. More on fil­ing struc­ture below.

2. On the Mac, remove the hard drive icon by select­ing “Pref­er­ences” (Cmd-,) and under the “Gen­eral” tab, des­e­lect “Hard disks” under “Show these items on the Desk­top”. On the PC, you can right-click on the desk­top and under the “View” sub­menu, des­e­lect “Show desk­top icons”.

3. On the Mac, set the Dock to auto-hide in the Dock pref­er­ences. I never use the Dock any­more (see the next section).

4. Choose a serene desk­top pic (or “wall­pa­per”). I like ones with a plain-colored back­ground (such as white or black) and a nice min­i­mal­ist pic­ture on it. Or just a nice nature scene. Noth­ing too distracting.

5. I also don’t like a lot of icons or apps in my menu bar, so I remove every­thing that isn’t nec­es­sary. Right now all I have is the clock and Spot­light. On the PC, I do the same thing — remove everything.

Sim­ple Inter­face

If you’re still using the mouse to open pro­grams and doc­u­ments, you should seri­ously con­sider using the key­board instead. It’s super fast and fric­tion­less, which means you can get things done with­out hav­ing to dig through fold­ers or scroll your cur­sor over your entire desk­top or go the Start menu (on a PC) or down to the Dock (on a Mac).

On the Mac, use the free and awe­some Quick­sil­ver. On the PC, I like Auto­HotKey or Launchy. They all work sim­i­larly: you can launch pro­grams and doc­u­ments with the key­board, with­out hav­ing to use the mouse or dig through a lot of fold­ers. Quick­sil­ver is by far the best, as it can do so, so much more.

So you need to start writ­ing — with a cou­ple of key­strokes, your trusty writ­ing pro­gram launches and you’re writ­ing in sec­onds. You need to look some­thing up or send an email? A few key­strokes away.

Keep­ing the inter­face sim­ple like this, with­out a real need for the Finder or Win­dows inter­face, makes things much easier.

Sim­ple Fil­ing

You don’t have time to file, to sort all your stuff into a mil­lion lit­tle fold­ers. You’re a busy per­son! You have big­ger and bet­ter things to do! Right?

So stop fil­ing. Set up only four fold­ers in your Doc­u­ments folder:

* 1Inbox: For things you’re down­load­ing. I empty this folder daily so it doesn’t fill up with junk.

* 2Working: For things you’re work­ing on now. Empty it weekly.

* 3Read: For stuff to read. Empty weekly.

* 4Archive: For every­thing else. When I empty the above three fold­ers, I just dump the files in here. Do I orga­nize it into sub­fold­ers and sub­sub­fold­ers? Heck no! I just dump it all here. Why? Search, and online files. Read on for more.

I still orga­nize my files in fold­ers, only because I per­son­ally think it’s more clut­tered to put every­thing in an Archive Folder.

1) I use 1 Inbox for all the things I have down­loaded from gmail.

2) I then move this to 2 MITs if it’s some­thing I need to work on. I work on it later.

3) If it’s some­thing I do not need to work on, but con­tains impor­tant infor­ma­tion I can use later, I put it in its proper folder in DOCUMENTS, or in 3 WP if it’s some­thing I can use in this blog.

4) If it does not fit any of the pre­vi­ous three options, I trash it.

Search and Online Files
You don’t need to orga­nize all your files into fold­ers any­more because of magic called Search. On the Mac, Quick­sil­ver and Spot­light cover this well. On the PC, I rec­om­mend Google Desk­top. These pro­grams index all your files — includ­ing the con­tents of the files — and put any file at your fin­ger­tips in seconds.

Seri­ously, I have been using this sys­tem for a few years and have never had trou­ble find­ing a sin­gle document.

Then again, my hard drive doesn’t have a lot of doc­u­ments on it (mostly movies and music and pic­tures) because I keep most of my doc­u­ments online. I use Google Docs and Spread­sheets, which means I never file any­thing. I just search and it’s there in half a second.

Keep­ing all my doc­u­ments online — even most of my pho­tos are online using Picasa — means they’re acces­si­ble from any com­puter, which is impor­tant to me as I switch between my iMac and Mac­book Air fre­quently, and some­times work from other com­put­ers. I don’t need to sync any­thing or carry around a USB drive.

I know some peo­ple will say, as they always do, that I’m a fool for giv­ing all my data to a com­pany (Google). What if the Inter­net crashes? What if Google folds? What if they do evil things with all of it?

All good points. I don’t see any of that hap­pen­ing soon, and I can always export it all if nec­es­sary. I’ve been using this sys­tem for three years with­out a sin­gle prob­lem. In those three years, I would have had to do 17,000 syncs or trans­fers of files, and my hard drive would have crashed once or twice, los­ing valu­able data if I don’t back up.

Tools

Your needs will dif­fer from mine, but I rec­om­mend using the sim­plest pro­grams for the work you need to do.

As a writer, I use TextE­dit (on the Mac) or Word­pad (for the PC). I also love, love the pro­gram Write­Room (Mac) or Dark­Room (PC) … it is so beau­ti­fully min­i­mal­ist, and blocks out all dis­trac­tions as I write.

For todo lists, I don’t like full-featured todo pro­grams because they’re too com­pli­cated and invite too much fid­dling and dis­trac­tions. I use Gmail’s sim­ple Task app or a sim­ple text file on my desk­top computer.

Keep your tools sim­ple. It allows you to focus on what’s impor­tant: creating.

I use the Mac ver­sion of Word because it allows me to use its NOTEBOOK LAYOUT view (pic­tured here). I like the fact that I can divide my notes into tabs.

where I write my notes