Opinion: The Tao of the Desktop

People can do all sorts of different things to their desktops. Some are cluttered, some are sparse, there are pictures, designs, photos—pretty much anything you can think of is, at the moment, on someone’s computer background. For the sake of productivity, many people stress the fact that your desktop should be clean—not filled with files that aren’t used—but that probably doesn’t work for everyone. How can you discover your perfect desktop?

The way I see it, there are really three different types of desktops. One has the background picture as the focus, one has files as the focus, and one has data. My desktop has gone through all three of these stages over the years. Currently, it only has three icons—my hard drive, a single folder, and my backup drive. Anything that shows up is automatically moved into that single folder through the magic of Hazel. The primary purpose of my desktop is to see my background picture (a shot from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris). I also have a few tidbits of data put up in Geektool, which prints text directly on your desktop, such as what is playing on my iTunes, my battery charge, and IP address. Now, this is the set-up that works for me. I’m a messy person by nature, so I had to find a way to force myself to keep things clean. I used to have files all around, but now, with my increasing use of Spotlight or Quicksilver, I no longer have to see things to open them.

There is, of course, too much of a good thing. Using Geektool, in addition to what I have already mentioned, I also had five separate to-do lists, weather, and all manner of other interesting but unnecessary system statistics. This was great from a standpoint of being informed, but my desktop picture was completely obscured and this depressed me.

Other people I know integrate their desktop backgrounds with the data on them, hiding stats in graffiti, or subway message boards. Others go the complete opposite direction and have countless files that they find by knowing their relations to other files. Many productivity experts say that you should always have a clean desktop—nothing to distract you, a clean slate to start from—but I know for a fact that this doesn’t work for everyone; here’s an example from a tech support company in Norway:

The answer to the question I asked earlier is really trial and error, at least in my experience. There are countless tools available to make your deskop as customized as you want it to be—extra wallpaper, built-in clocks, and so on. See how you work with no files. See how you work with a plain background, or if you really want to see places you’ve been, people you’ve met, then stick a photo or two up there. Data is helpful, but don’t go overboard. Try things out. Play around. After all, it’s a great way to procrastinate. Your desktop may end up being completely different than mine, but I can hope that I at least made you think about it, and set you on your road to your perfect screen.

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