This is one of those things that we all know, yet often overlook. I’m guilty of it myself and often allow my desk, filing cabinets and PC to become overloaded and overflowing with tons of disorganized crap.
Friday afternoon I got into a bit of a cleaning mood though, so wen through all of the papers and notes on my desk, filing cabinets and the table I keep in my office.
It took hours to sort through it all, decide what to keep and what not to, and then to organize what I was keeping in a useful manner.
Then I tackled my PC. I download tons of garbage. From Music to videos, PDF files, presentations, documents and software.
Usually I download stuff, try or review it, and unless it blows me away I tend to forget about it. Which leads to a massive build-up of junk on my hard drive.
In all I removed over 30 GB’s of junk from my PC Friday evening. Then I ran a registry cleaner because that crap always leaves little useless entries in the Windows registry–and then I defragmented my hard drive (which took about an hour).
So, Yay! I’ve got all kinds of free space in my office and on my PC again, but that’s not the point of this post.
I’ve realized (more like remembered) today that there are 2 major benefits to uncluttering beyond the idea that it’s just nice to have a clean workspace. First, my PC is a lot faster than it was before I cleaned and defragged it. System performance usually degrades slowly over time, so it’s not always easy to recognize how slow your machine has become until you suddenly see how fast it can be again.
And second, here it is not quite 4 in the afternoon on a Monday and I’m already finished with all of my required work for the day.
That NEVER happens! And especially not on Mondays, yet here it is. And why? Because when I cleaned my PC I also setup a few new organizational tools to help me streamline some of my daily activities.
That, more than anything else, made a massive improvement to my productivity today.
I won’t bore you with the step by steps of what I did because everybody has differing needs so my details wouldn’t be very helpful to anyone else, but I will share the 2 best tools (in my opinion) that I added to my PC Desktop over the weekend.
#1 – Yahoo! Widgets. There are over 5000 different widgets available, so just about anybody should be able to find a few that will improve their productivity. Whether its widgets that display information and save you from having to check on a web site throughout the day, or widgets for daily planning, or in one instance for me a widget that puts Post-It notes on my desktop. I make tons of tiny notes for myself through the day, so this one is great and now I don’t have to look around for my notes among the clutter of my desk later when I’m free to accomplish some task or return a call.
#2 – RocketDock. This neat tool lets you run a dock on your desktop for quick application launches, and with the Star Docklet add-on you can turn any folder into a launch platform for yourself. Now, if I need an Open Offic or MS Office application, I just go to the dock icon for either suite and get a pop-up with each available tool. I’ve also created a folder to hold my web applications, marketing tools, research tools… putting all of my most used tools just a quick-click away for me no matter what I’m doing or working on without having to navigate the Windows Start menu anymore.
Sure, it only takes a moment or so to use the Start menu and find the program I need, but when I’m jumping around and ultimately launching dozens of programs through the course of a day, those moments add up to a lot of lost time. That’s where RocketDock is impressing me the most. If it saves me 5 minutes per day from searching for programs then that’s a half hour per week or 2 hours per month, I can do a lot with that time.
Both of these tools are free to use so check them out and see if–and how–they might help you to increase your productivity on a daily basis.
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Tags: clutter, productivity
