Last December I was away from home for 3 weeks helping a friend get ready for a move. When I came home to my office, I was struck by the clutteredness of it. No it wasn’t stacks of paper or junk, just little knick-nacks.
I’ve begun to do a fall purge, going through every area of the house, cleaning and putting stuff it a future Garage Sale tote.
I moved the location of the tissue box from the drawer to on top of the speaker sub, and I’ve caught myself going back to the old spot several times. Its amazing how you body has the memory of where things were.
Want to read more on the subject? Check out http://observer.com/2016/09/five-ways-to-hack-your-workspace-for-productivity.
A couple things I want to touch on from that article.
From this part:
A great example of this is writer and artist Austin Kleon who keeps two desks setup in his space: an ‘analog’ desk filled with paper, pens, and markers; and a ‘digital’ desk with laptop and tablet. Idea creation and ‘playing’ takes place on only the analog desk, while shaping, editing, and publishing is in the digital domain.
So neat that I’ve essentially done this. I rearranged the office so that on one side I’ve got my desk with 3 monitors and all my computer stuff, then behind me where I just need to spin around and roll a couple inches is my roll top desk that I have all my paper supplies.
One technique I’ve used lately is to close all of my tabs in my browser at the end of the day (a hellish chore for any writer), leaving only my most important task open. The next day, the easiest choice is just to keep working on whatever was left from the day before.
Ahh this is sorta what I do. I use the Tabs Outliner extension in Chrome to see how many tabs and browser windows I have open. Right now its 117 tabs across 19 windows. Most of last year I was usually over 250. After working with my coach I realized that it was over taxing me. Finally got to the point that I was running about 50 but it creeps up slowly that I have to make a concerted effort to get them down again.
See I tend to work in cycles. I will work on something till I get stumped, distracted or run out of energy for it. So I leave the page open in my browser. Because I have 3 monitors, I can spread them across to manage them better.
My left monitor is for:
- Skype, my ‘primary Chrome tab’ (Google Voice, Harvest time tracking, Pandora and Trello To Do list).
- To Do browser window (I literally Google ‘*To Do‘ {The asterisk sets it apart from other browser windows} and have that be the first tab so any additional tabs I add to that browser, are stuff that I want to do/read/act but don’t want to let get lost in a bookmark abyss).
- Various windows with tabs of stuff I need to complete before I can close the tab. Here again I mark them with an asterisk if its a category of tabs. For instance if I’m researching a new appointment program and I’ve got various open, I’ll have the first tab be *Appointment System.
- Periodically, FireFox browser for my personal Facebook profile.
- Any folders for files relating to what I’m working on.
My center monitor is for stuff that I am actively working on — or NEED to be. Usually will be the WordPress back end of my business website, a clients website, Camtasia for video editing, Xara for designing.
My right monitor is for Outlook, email drafts that I leave open while I work on them, Facebook tab, and any other reference tabs.
I am very particular about the order that these are in. I use Display Fusion for taskbar management and it allows me to drag and drop the windows in the order I want them. Just like putting your keys back in the same place every time, I always know where to find things. The exception for this is when my computer gets hung up and does a resorting error.
I use Display Fusion for my desktop wallpaper. When I was in Colorado last, I took a bunch of panorama photos of the mountains. I cropped them so they are exactly 5760px X 1080px and put them all in one folder where the program will randomly flip through them. Its the best way to enjoy your photos every day!
This might seem very overwhelming to some, but I have great capacity to manage it.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
