Showing posts tagged experience

Working without distraction : my minimalist Macintosh experience

I hate to be disturbed. I try to end every day with an empty “Today” list in Things and an empty Inbox in Gmail. I don’t want to be interrupted while I’m working on one task. Most of the points below are tricks that help me empty my Things inbox and complete projects. In other words: they help me get things done.

About the Finder:

  • I use a dark background (the fewer details the better) and the Mac OS Graphite theme so that only the colors get my attention (that means notification in the Dock).
  • I dumped most of the icons from my task bar: I don’t care about the volume (I have three dedicated keys on my keyboard), I don’t care about how much battery I have unless the icon turns red. Jumpcut is a very useful utility for clipboard history.
  • I removed most of the icons from my Dock : I only left the applications that are always launched (Tweetie already has an icon in the task bar, but we can’t remove the one from the Dock, yet). I use Spotlight to launch the other applications.
  • I use Command-Option-H to hide every application but the one I’m using: I almost never need more than one window to focus on.
  • I don’t use any notification system: no Growl, no Gmail Notifier, no Facebook notifier, and Tweetie task bar icon is set to never turn blue except when I got a direct message.
  • I don’t use NetNewsWire on my Mac anymore. I only check my RSS feeds in the morning during my commute to work, using the new iPhone app. Breaking news make it through Twitter. Interesting-but-long articles go into Instapaper, I read them before going to sleep.
  • Hazel’s default configuration help me empty my Downloads folder.

Safari:

  • I removed the previous/next buttons: I use trackpad gestures for that.
  • I removed the bookmarks bar: Command-L is my friend, and for the small amounts of bookmarklets I use, they’re all in the dedicated bookmarks menu.
  • I hide the status bar. The prefpane Secrets offers the possibility to show a link’s URL if you move the mouse over the link.
  • My homepage is Start.io: it’s clean and shows the links I open in the morning when I sit in front of my Mac.
  • I watch YouTube videos within Quietube: video without the distractions.
  • I read ugly online newspapers within Readability.
  • I use ClickToFlash to get rid of the worst thing that happened to the web: Flash.

Gmail:

  • I realized I don’t either need to read my e-mails every minute, nor to answer e-mails the minute I received them: I only check my e-mails when I’m not focused on a task. It’s more productive and less intrusive than a Growl notification.
  • I make a smart use of Gmail filters so that only important e-mails get to the Inbox, and I immediately archive the one I read (and answered if needed). Gmail Labs provide a useful “Send and archive” button for that.
  • j/k/x/e are my friends: I use these keys to quickly select and archive e-mails.

Interested in uncluttering your Mac? Read Minimal Mac.