Workspace Wonders
Update: It’s just not right to write on a 19″ old school CRT, so I upgraded to a new Dell flatscreen. So much easier on the eyes! Now I can spend more time at my desk, writing of course.
Do you ever look at your workspace and wonder if it’s keeping you down? Do you ever look at your workspace and wonder if it’s keeping you down?
This last week I had a bit of an epiphany. I was going about my daily routine and it came time to clear of my Windows desktop of the usual stuff that gathers there over the course of a few months. As I was deleting things I thought to myself, “Maybe it’s my desktop? What if an entire new change of workflow could make life easier and inspire more productivity?”
As such coincidences often happen, it was one day last week a coworker and I were reading our favorite site LifeHacker, which featured posts about RocketDock and Launchy.
RocketDock is an app for Windows that gives you a program icon dock much like a Mac. I’m not a huge Mac fan, but after trying RocketDock I certainly have a newfound appreciation for their interface design. I cleaned off my desktop, hid all my icons including the RecycleBin using TweakUI, and then RocketDock all the way. Also made a visit to Caedes.net, my favorite place to get slick desktop backgrounds. You can see my new workspace above. I set up something similar at work.
The results? I’ve got a cleaner workspace, and more efficient setup for getting in the groove. Need a change? Maybe you need a few workspace wonders?
Trackbacks/Pings
Leave a reply
Comments
February 12th, 2007 at 12:11 am
Interesting. I didn’t even know you could do that to windows. I wonder if Microsoft endorses such things, Mac users might port over to Windows or something of that nature.
Thanks for the link.
February 12th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Good question. I imagine as iterations of various OS go by they will get more customizable by default. And if not, there’s always 3rd party apps like RocketDock, PowerToys, etc.
February 16th, 2007 at 11:08 pm
Cool toys, Eric. What Calendar program is that in the screen shot?
February 16th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
It’s the calendar widget from Yahoo Widgets Engine. Definitely worth checking out.
http://widgets.yahoo.com/
February 17th, 2007 at 3:25 am
Awesome, thanks Eric.
April 16th, 2007 at 6:22 am
cool blog!
May 12th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Just wondering how you got rid of the start menu and task bar (I couldn’t see either in your screen shots, and google has failed me in my search for a non l337 method).
Also: thanks for the tip, Rocket Dock is awesome!
May 18th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
If I remember correctly I used a program called TweakUI from PowerToys.