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The author found something that works for them, but for some folks who have working memory issues (i.e. ADHD), using visual cues as reminders is one of the top tips in ways to address the issue. This can seem messy to some, but for those that need it, it is a lifeline. As a contrast to the author, if I put something in a drawer, it might be months before I remember it, even if it was something that absolutely needed to be dealt with (and yes, there will often be consequences of having not done the thing, and this has to be balanced against leaving everything out which isn't good either). Electronically, if I close Slack/Teams, I might go hours before remembering to open it and check in - maybe great for focus, not so great for team work.

I've found that for me, spreading things out and having visual cues allows my brain to relax and focus on the task at hand, because I know I don't have to use a memory slot to remember to do something that I don't have a visual cue for, because every so often I see that cue and know it isn't going anywhere until I have time to deal with it. Almost the exact opposite of the anxiety the author describes. (And before it's suggested, yes, I also take notes and put important tasks there, but it isn't as helpful for my brain to let something go compared to having a visual cue.)

The philosopher John Perry wrote a funny essay about the topic, called “A Plea for the Horizontally Organized” (https://structuredprocrastination.com/light/organization_por... / https://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~david/plea.html).

It's really short and would fit in a comment here, but quoting just some fun bits:

> A vertical organizer would have scooped this stuff up, and put it in a file to retrieve later. Had I done this, there would be a bare spot on my desk. These bare spots are the mark of vertical organizers. They are a dead give away.

> […] The fact is, I am a horizontal organizer. I like all the thing I am working on spread out on a surface in front of me, where they can beckon me to continue working on them. When I put something in a file, I never see it again. The problem isn't that I can't find it (although that has happened), but that I don't look. I am constitutionally incapable of opening a filing cabinet and fishing out a half-finished project to resume working on it.

This. My very first thought upon reading this article was "this author does not have ADHD." I've achieved one of my most productive setups ever by keeping more browser tabs open, and using tab groups to organize them. When I need to switch to one of a handful of projects I'm working on, the tabs in that group help hydrate my memory space around the project.

I work better with a conceptual (but not actual) blank slate, by asking myself each day what the top three things are that I need to get done that day, and not allowing an ever-growing TODO list to get in the way of seeing what's important.

I agree with your point, that you need to find something that works for you.

I have ADHD and use the start-from-zero or as I would call it Inbox-Zero method personally

FWIW, I do aim for inbox-zero for email, and similar for chat apps (Slack/Teams). Otherwise it piles up and gets overwhelming. I'm referring more to things like - "only the exact thing you're currently working on open" part. I agree systems are needed. For me it's Obsidian for notes, inbox zero, and OneTab extension to allow me to remove tabs without fear of "losing" them completely. I've learned that it's also a trap to over-complicate my system, even something like Todoist which is fairly minimal was semi-problematic, although I may come back to it - just using manual TODO checklists in Obsidian with a small table that pulls them all into a single dashboard file for reference.

The cost of a perfectly clean surface can be that nothing ever re-enters attention

recently diagnosed ADHD -- any tips on strategies?

Resist the urge to over-complicate things. With ADHD, it's really easy to hyperfocus and end up building a "beautiful" system that doesn't work at all for you. Then you give up and start all over. So instead, pick small things that you can incorporate into routines, which are a saving grace especially with ADHD - just include enough space for a bit of flexibility so it doesn't get stale/boring.

For instance, I have a morning routine which ensures I'm "presentable"/etc. When I start work I immediately create the day's note, go to the previous day and review, copy over any ongoing tasks, etc. My day note is the same thing every day: Things I did, Things I need to do, Meeting notes (important meeting notes get extracted to their own file), Random notes. Then setting in to work. Evenings are bit more flexible and the weekends tend to be the wild west, bit of a reset so I don't feel "trapped" in a cycle, etc.

I do struggle with weekly/monthly or longer intermittent routines. Even stuff like doing bills (automated as much as possible), re-ordering prescriptions, etc. So it's always a process.

Last thing so as not to go too long - not everyone runs into this, but in case you've gotten down on yourself at times and now realize it might be ADHD, give your self a break / forgive yourself. Same thing going forward. Not an excuse, not continuing to seek improvement, but realizing that when you stumble, there is a reason and it may not be something you can actually control. Reflect on what you could do to prevent it in the future, but do it without self-blame or criticism. Be kind to yourself, in other words.

Structure your routine(s). Default rules save you a lot of cognitive load.

Avoid scrolling apps. Avoid touchscreens for a couple of hours after waking up. Try to work a few pages of long form reading into your daily routine. It will become easier to remain focused for longer over time.

Don't fall for grand schemes and definitive solutions. We are prone to manic-depressive cycling as we think we've solved everything now and than fail to follow up.

Try to make everything you want to be doing very easy to get started on and everything you don't want to be doing harder. Cultivate this pattern.

It's not one big thing, it's a bunch of little things. And if you have a (few) bad days or weeks or months, don't spiral. Forgive yourself and try again tomorrow.

This is great meta advice, definitely take heed.

I would add - going for a walk and having a shower are both excellent circuit breakers.

I was diagnosed (finally) in 2018 (my early thirties). Hyper focus has always been my cursed superpower. There were times in my life where I could disappear into my own little world only to surface 6, 8, 12 hours later and realise I really needed to eat and go to the bathroom and damn I should probably shower sometime this week.

Apart from the parent comment's point about visual cues, the biggest thing for me is rituals. Specific enjoyable or unavoidable or easy to maintain rituals really helped break that focus. Dogs are a part of that for me, since you only ignore their needs at your peril. Taking them for a walk and putting on an audiobook or podcast so that I don't think about work makes it a lot easier to slip into something else when I get back.

I haven't done the Pomodoro thing but I could definitely see the appeal in a rigid timer that screams "hey you! it's time to get off your ass and do something else for a bit".

lists and sticky notes placed in places that will catch your eye (e.g., where something normally isn't, such as taped to your front door).

Routines. Exercise. Meditation. Medication. Self-forgiveness. Spatial reminders.

Celebrate your differences, acknowledge your limitations.

For inattentive type, try forcing transitions when someone interrupts you. Walk to a new room together.

For hyperactive type, try planning out multiple synergistic things to do in parallel towards the one goal.

This is a great reminder that I need to re-incorporate exercise into my routines, thanks! It fell out a little while back, and it has a very positive effect overall.

I've found mostly the opposite. Some well arranged windows are quite a nice anchor, I'm working on what's there in front of me. It's like bowling with bumpers in place, instead of the ball going in the gutter, the structure keeps it in the lane. I've found it necessary to devote time to cleaning and clearing windows, and sometimes I forget what's going on, and as I'm closing out the windows because I forgot what was going on, oh! there's this half finished thing that I actually really want finished.

What am I working on, what's in progress? The work space is the map. The terrain is changing as the task progresses, and so must the map, but the map is useful, even if it takes a bit of redrawing here and there.

The desktops (multiple, 3-7) are the map of the work. Part of the work is keeping the map accurate, not wadding it up and throwing it in the trash.

I suppose different things work for different people, but I started with the suggestion here and came around to skillful use of space as the work map itself.

Cleaning and updating are continuous, not a 'big bang' clear-the-desks event, mostly. But if it's not continuous, the big bang is probably better.

Some spots are problem spots, like digital notebooks, desktop icons. When I notice a problem spot, I create a recurring task to remove one X per week, or in some of the worst cases, one X per day. I have a rule of clearing out the oldest two days of email each day. I miss some days if I'm busy, but on average rate out = rate in, because I will always catch up within a day or two applying the rule that the oldest two days of email need eviction (make a task out of it, archive it, whatever) every day. Rate out = rate in

I think it's where one plugs the external world into in their brain. For my daily work, I plug the desktop to my current thought stream (or short term memory?). Anything not immediately relevant to what I'm thinking about is an unnecessary speed bump or stutter in my speech, which means minimal window decoration, no status bars, ... and anything not visible can be summoned by a quick single "label" somehow, not by navigating a structure. This is more similar to what the author suggested.

{And if I'm getting what you said correctly} What you described, is similar to how I organize my drawers in my room. Everything is visible at once, but navigating them usually takes 2 or 3 steps. Without this visual map I'm completely lost.

Agree that different things work for different people. And even different things work for the same person at different time.

I, too, operate using the "nothing" approach as my DEFAULT and most common mode.

In my mind, the big things I never forget to attend to (they are big). The small things that I might forget, who cares, they're less important and the forgetting is a natural prioritization mechanism.

Some times I do feel overwhelmed by how many "big things" I have to juggle but won't "remember" or "it takes too much cognitive load to track". In that case, I make an ephemeral list on paper. That helps me adjust my perspective (sometimes things that I worried about are now clearly in the not urgent or not importang bucket).

I'd be pretty lost without my pretty crazy zellij setup.

Zellic - wow there goes a day learning a new awesome tool. This is just what I need (I think, based on a quick glance).

Thank you for mentioning this - best tip of the day ;-)

Seems to be inspired from emacs/doom-emacs and friends … great!!!

Can you elaborate? just tried zellij for the first time the other day

Sure, I have to change a lot of contexts, and each contexts has a lot of sections.

So basically I have

- A session for dev

   - each tab is a service

       - each service has a pane, vim, claude code, runner (npm run dev, go run etc)

    - vim
    - staing
    - prod

- Misc

I thought this might be a neat JetBrains thing. Turns out this is an even cooler tmux.

Thanks for sharing, I'm gonna grab this right away.

I never got the hand of tmux, and I really tried, but zellij clicked immediately

If the workspace evolves with the work, it stays useful

I understand why people organize things around them, also on their computer. While I am working I also do it. On Gnome I have 1-2 desktops per tasks when working on multiple things. As you say say, they are "the map of the work", nice metaphor. But, jumping in the next morning I get sort of overwhelmed, especially with multiple tasks ongoing.

Over time I have come to the ritual of closing everything in the evening (end of afternoon really), what is still running is on servers in Tmux labeled with the task number, sometimes I leave Readme's open with instructions to myself (vscode or obsidian), but starting clean works better for me (like OP). I sort of slowly load the context in the morning and start to ramp up. That is what it feels like. It works for me. When I boot up, I have 5 empty desktops and zero tabs open in the browser. But it is all filled up relatively quickly again. I do have rituals/rules, like secondary, longer running tasks (ie long running data analysis workflows) are usually on desktop 4. Element/Slack/Signal on desktop 5, outlook/teams (for current client) + other side stuff in browser on desktop 1. Desktop 2 is very dynamic, usually where I spend most time, it overflows onto desktop 3 when I need more space, both are filled with terminals, vscode, browser windows. I have my laptop screen on the side, but for some reason never use it... I just use my Iiyama ultra-wide with quarter tiling (probably would tile more if Gnome would support it, KDE did, loved that, but love the simplicity of Gnome more).

I'm considering making 6 desktops haha. Oh, I really can't work with dynamic desktops, as I "need" some stuff to be on the final desktop, far away yet easy to reach.

Current client has an Excel file for tasks. Really hate that. Tried pushing her to MS Tasks, didn't really work well. But I also need a large space for context and subtasks. For some data analysis tasks I made a small Django system, with a page (model/view) per dataset. That works very well for us, it was very much worth the effort to set that up. The view grabs in data from several locations so it also helps me quickly look things up.

Every day I work on my main project, I clear my desk completely, take out a small notepad and write my overriding goal, and my next step goal, and then make a list of tasks for that next step goal.

Then I work.

Writing the major goal every day is important to not let sub-goals overshadow it. Writing the immediate goal every day is important because together the two goals create a very clear direction of action with a clear next step.

I have my screen mounted on the wall, and have side end-tables for pens, papers and notes I need, etc. so my desk is absolutely clear.

My desk is a half circle, but not that deep, because that optimizes the usefulness of the surface for work (not storage).

I have gone into doing this form time to time. And they were good times, thanks for reminding me, I'll start doing this again. I'm now 44 and always wanted to be fully digital and modern, but nothing beats the notepad and pen for me still, for certain small tasks at least.

Rewriting the main goal every morning is a nice way to prevent "local optimization," where you get very efficient at doing things that don't actually move the project forward

This kind of daily goal setting reminds me a lot of this podcast, if of interest. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/invest-like-the-best-w...

Are you recommending the podcast or this particular episode? :)

This particular episode.

Jack Dorsey suggests a similar technique for goal setting and resolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rn9lTpD-yKc&t=2528

Could you elaborate as to what the difference is between your overriding goal and your next step goal?

My recently achieved overriding goal took 32 years to accomplish! i worked on it as a side project all that time and it took me places i never expected. Very happy.

I recommend being less ambitious! Or be smarter than me!

Now my major goal is to complete the first tools in that area. it’s still challenging but I think the first version will have only taken 12 months. There is just a lot of newly settled stuff that I am getting fluent in.

12 months seems like a good length of time for a major goal.

Immediate goals are the closest challenging milestone. I.e. a necessary task that requires non-trivial design and/or implementation.

I think both major and immediate goals should be stretch goals with actual impact at different scales. 6-18 months and 2 to 8 weeks are typical ranges. But as my first paragraph notes, the major goal is the big thing that needs to be done, so however long that takes. It is inspiring to aim for significance, and it pushes me to not waste time on all scales of life.

And then I replot my path to the immediate goal. Usually takes under a minute. Mundane steps and questions to settle.

I recreate a the whole plan every morning like that. The repetition embeds the plan and goals into my conscious and subconscious minds.

And also keeps everything fluid.

Every morning, any new perspective can alter anything in the plan, including the goals if need be. Altering the immediate goal, or a better definition of the major goal.

Does that mean you sat down every work day for 32 years and wrote the same thing on the top of your notepad? I appreciate the consistency but it looks like you could've gotten it inscribed on a plaque at that point :)

Ha! No I didn’t write that goal down every day. Partly because it was a side project, and partly because it was engraved - on my brain!

I did write the goal down a lot, on working notes, and put it on my fridge, my whiteboard, my pin board, along with next steps and lists of tasks for each.

It was too hard to work on one next step, because there was so much I didn’t know, and it was impossible to know which step was going to cave in first.

That’s when I learned to clear my desk, whenever work hit a wall, and rewrite the goals and steps. To completely reset my mind so I could move forward in a clear alternate direction without pause.

Later I noticed doing that reset every morning helped even more.

I thought a lot about Don Quixote as time went by. I dreamt an impossible dream. Under a star. And then, one day, I got in!

I know this is bad form (a convoluted way of replying "this") but I'd love to hear the answer to this one!

Can you please write more about it? What was the goal? Also I love the Angela Merkel method - thinking what you can do in a day or a week is fruitless as the productivity might vary. Thinking in years is too long. Think about what you can achieve in 100 days.

> Thinking in years is too long. Think about what you can achieve in 100 days.

You are right that 100 days can mean a lot.

But if you are always thinking "What is the most important thing I could ever do, if I just did one thing?", sooner or later you may find something where time isn't an organizational issue, because your North Star has become so clear.

I don't try to guess how long anything will take in any serious way. I set targets, but those are to push myself, visualize success, not schedule anything.

“Don’t weigh yourself every day, do weigh yourself every week.”

I would assume the former is the 'actual' goal - implement the feature, fix the bug, etc.; the next step goal is the current burrow of rabbit hole, the refactoring, dependency upgrade, patch to third-party lib, unexpected other ticket, etc. that you had to do on the way.

This sounds like the 5S framework from Toyota, where people keep areas, neat, clean, and organized as a work principal.

The 5S acronym is:

Sort (remove what you don’t need)

Set in Order (organize what remains so it’s easy to find/use)

Shine (clean the area regularly)

Standardize (create consistent rules/checklists)

Sustain (maintain the discipline long-term)

The difference to me is that 5S is about making a shared environment predictable and efficient, while what the article describes feels more like a personal cognitive reset

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Alas, I think it is far more likely that there is no secret to any of this. Different strokes will arrive at the same place for a lot of people. All the more true for things that are even remotely creative in nature.

Not to say that routine and form can't get results. It is hilarious how much of the current fascination with LLM writing can be summarized by "actually filling out a routine template will satisfy a ton of requirements." People that are surprised with how well some output works, but would have scoffed at filling out a lot of boilerplate in previous technologies.

So, yes, try it. But do not become attached to it. If it works, rejoice in that. But do not count on it always working. If it stops for a time, feel free to leave it for a time.

Absolutely. "One size fits all", doesn't. Doesn't even fit one, all of the time.

The most important part is to just pay attention to how your current setup affects your mood, creativity, focus, etc. It'll be way easier to adjust once you're in tune with that.

It's really easy to end up on autopilot with the structure of your workdays, only to notice that it doesn't work for the current project all that well. Getting stuck on the 'nothing' approach can be just as bad as getting stuck on a 'hundred tabs' approach if you're just doing one or the other because you've always been doing it.

this is the real takeaway imo. the specific system matters way less than the meta skill of actually noticing how your environment affects you.

i've been thinking about this a lot lately, there's something interesting about how most productivity tools optimize for doing more when the actual bottleneck for a lot of people is noticing what they're already doing. like, you don't need another todo app, you need to realize you've been context switching every 4 minutes for the last hour.

the author's "start from nothing" is basically forced mindfulness: you can't autopilot into your old tabs if they don't exist. i wonder if the same principle applies to other areas, forcing yourself to consciously reconstruct your context instead of just inheriting it.

I've worked in the software industry for just over twenty years now. In my experience basically without question the most productive people I have known have had the messiest most chaotic setups online and offline. Hundreds of windows open, more icons on their desktop than it can display.

I worked with an older gentleman for the last decade until recent layoffs who had worked on Oregon Trail for MECC. Single most productive person I've known in my life. I aspire for half the career he's had. His desk was absolute chaos. He had multiple computers on his desk across an unmatched mix of monitors, all as described above, controlled with Synergy.

The least productive people I've known have clean aesthetic desks, no icons on their desktop, and inbox zero.

Don't get me wrong, there are absolutely people that are a mess that aren't productive at all. I have worked with them too. Frankly, in their case, cleanup like this suggests probably would actually help. I've just never seen the opposite.

I just know that the most productive people I've known have been insanely good at managing chaos, and lean into it.

Hear hear!

I maintain it’s because productive people know how to focus on what matters, to cut through the noise, and it’s not just by carefully thinking things through (though that’s an important skill too). It’s partly because they “just don’t see” the noise - if you like, they’re not distracted by it, they can tune it out - or rather, they don’t need to spend any energy tuning it out because they don’t ‘see’ or hear it in the first place!

I’ve frequently been: 1. Complimented on my productivity 2. Told I need a less messy workspace/environment.

One of these is true, the other is a road to depression - wasting time and energy tidying up and then feeling like I got no actual work done because, well, I didn’t!

There’s obviously a limit - continual small bits of sorting and organising ensure I can still sit at my desk and find stuff on my computer, but it doesn’t need to be the extreme clear-desk policy that proponents of Clean Work seem to be pushing. There’s a huge zone in between the two extremes.

I don’t tidy up very often, but when I do, it doesn’t take much time or energy. I just dump everything that isn’t version controlled into a junk folder, and it feels great.

I keep Inbox zero, mostly, using this system. If I haven't read it, how important could it have been, CTRL+A, DEL gets you to zero.

Instructions unclear: I purchased multiple bins, labeled them V1, V2, V3, and have dumped most of my pens, pencils and notebooks into them. What now?

Lol

> if you like, they’re not distracted by it, they can tune it out - or rather, they don’t need to spend any energy tuning it out because they don’t ‘see’ or hear it in the first place!

The human body is not made of regular lines.You can see it in ergonomics accessories. They are not what we would call beautiful. While I love to tidy every once in a while (mostly for cleaning), everything will eventually fallback into some organic arrangement where I don't need to think about what I need and what I don't will eventually get removed. I think about task planning, then I offload the result in the environment. Starting fresh every day will just gobble up my time in order to reconstruct the environment again.

>In my experience basically without question the most productive people I have known have had the messiest most chaotic setups online and offline. Hundreds of windows open, more icons on their desktop than it can display.

Man, I wish this would also work in reverse, like being messy would automatically make me a good programmer.

I have known several highly productive people who were also neat.

I one had a roommate who, when they get stuck on a technical problem, start cleaning. The change of pace would often give them sparks of inspirations -- sort of like shower-thoughts without the shower.

Agreed to an extent. I think there are different axes at play here though.

Their desk and computer setup is chaotic, but their "task system" is probably very minimalist. Either it's nonexistent - everything's in their head. Or it's a scribble pad with the next few things they need to do which they cross off and then write new things. Or it's a .txt. At most it's a .md but even that's already stretching it.

What it's not is an immaculately structured maximalist Notion workspace - which is what the "clean desk" people you're talking about often prefer.

I know and have known plenty intelligent coworkers that spend more time organizing and creating structures and planning than actually doing anything useful. I had a colleague who spent so much time setting up his coding environment and whatnot - that when we finished the project he hadn't done anything. at all.

Likely because the high-productive people have already transcended basic hurdles like getting overwhelmed or distracted through sustained long-term practice, to the extent that they no longer feel having an uncluttered environment necessary to have an uncluttered mind at work.

It is unlikely this will work for those less experienced.

I agree with the post. As someone with... attention issues and a deeply cluttered space due to decision fatigue and "I'll just get to it later", having a blank slate is very useful for regaining focus. Otherwise, it's just a constant mental pressure to decide which of the unfinished tasks to focus on, and that never helps.

As one step, I've taken to just nuking my browser sessions at the start of the week. If it was really important to keep, I would've bookmarked it. If it's important, it'll come up again.

Sure, sometimes I lose of forget something useful or important. But the key part is that I'm making a choice between a 20%-100% constant loss of focus, and the occasional missed item I should've kept.

By regularly nuking context, I've also trained myself to better note down those things I do want to track (I've been bouncing between Reminders.app and Emacs Org-Mode) (I am not asking for task tracker advice)

I can relate. I enjoy the feeling of being free to close any window because it takes so little effort to bring it back. So, during a day, I close around a hundred of windows.

And it really helps to not think about accumulated junk.

The trick is to make the workflow really dynamic so that the process of managing it doesn’t stand in the way.

Some folks prefer to accumulate. I think this is fine as long as they make a system comfortable to navigate. Their approach wouldn’t work if they had to use a dynamic system that forced them to manage their dozens of sessions all the time. Conversely, their tools seem to be slow for a dynamic user.

When I write book chapters I write, throw away, write, throw away. Mostly with no a-priori outline

But eventually I get to a point where all the failed attempts crystallize and it flows out of me start to finish in one sitting. Every piece of knowledge from those failed attempts crystallizes into one gestalt of how it’s supposed to be.

Those final “easy” 20 pages always come after 100 pages of discarded, frustrating, exploratory work that feels like it’s going nowhere.

Also a deadline helps.

It was fun writing our book because I SAW you do that. And I had a different approach - I would outline obsessively and hold the whole chapter in my head at once before I started writing. Holding a whole chapter and cross referencing everything with everything else was O(N^2). You're approach for writing one instance of the chapter was linear O(N) but you did it M times... so O(M*N) ... maybe about the same :P

Yeah, one of the toughest but most rewarding lessons I've learned about writing is how valuable it can be to set aside your current draft and start from scratch.

It's very tempting to want to write an outline & then revise the outline until it's perfect, so that your first draft can be as solid as possible. That never works out well for me, though. It's only after I've written a substantial chunk of the thing that I realize half my ideas were bad and the other half are being poorly realized, and I start to understand the story I really want to write.

I'm very taken with this one HYTRADBOI talk [1] that applies a similar approach to software design. It's not something I've ever gotten a chance to apply, but it really appeals to me.

[1]: https://www.hytradboi.com/2025/03580e19-4646-4fba-91c3-17eab...

But I will loose it all, that's why you should bookmark everything, have terminal bookmarks of paths, use git worktrees to allow leaving workspace messy. Use a lot of notion docs, .md docs, notebooks. Places where you organize stuff, so that you can come back easily when you need it again.

A running txt file for each project/work capsule has been wonders. Then common txt files for anything you learned or, things you need to learn, notes/todos, etc.

I think I would be half as productive as I'd like without this.

Yes. I have started doing this with an Obsidian note for each project. Any ongoing lists go there, and each day has a heading with todos and thought process while solving the todos. Then in my main todo list or kanban I just link to the project with one sentence on where to resume the next day.

I've setup my ~/Stuff, ~/CurrentStuff and mkstuff some time ago and it's extremely useful to keep clutter under control for me. I use this as temporary working directories for small stuff that's not a real project yet. `mkstuff ticket-123-team-db-troubleshooting` creates me a directory `~/Stuff/2026-02/12-ticket-123-team-db-troubleshooting` and drops the shell into that. ~/CurrentStuff is just a link to current months stuff.

This way I have everything about a ticket in a place and if someone is like "uhh, you did something to something some 3 months ago or so?" - ~/Stuff/2025-1{0,1,2} probably knows, I certainly don't. I can find things again like this :)

I'll eventually have to setup some automated archiving for it, but so far it's not using too much space.

Yes, I do believe you own the correct answers - however, can you make a long form blog post about this and share it on Hacker News? We need the rest of the information.

My room should be messy when I come back to it - how else would I find anything if it wasn’t where I left it?

I saved thousands of bookmarks and realized that I hadn't opened a single one in ten years. It would be better to have open windows.

I started working on a task management app that could handle the massive amounts of context switching I do on a daily basis - aggregated over slack, iOS reminders, Jira, linear, and obsidian... I'm glad I'm not alone in having such crazy environment.

I tried this. Never managed to bother going back to those "organized" notes though; ended up being a waste of time.

I have a system for electronics projects where a new project gets a labeled container to store extra parts, papers, spare PCBs, weird cables I might need later...

It works pretty well, especially when I want to take a project to a meetup.

Unfortunately, I also have a bin labeled "Projects".

Same. I've got a couple of folders in my ~/Documents titled "Other".

Also, if you have projects with lots of parts, and you've got a 3D printer: have you discovered Gridfinity? (or others like Multibuild?) For the uninitiated, these are wall/drawer 42mm grids, in which you place bins that are multiples of 42. So you get perfectly-sized Tetris-like drawers and walls.

One thing I've started doing at my newest job is to keep things separate; I have separate browser profiles for personal, my employer and my current contract, separate password database files, and I try to keep them on separate MacOS spaces as well, although that gets a bit messy sometimes if I'm being honest.

What I should do is also keep them mentally separate - don't go to HN while at work, disable personal notifications while at work, etc. But at the same time, I often have 'downtime' at work (waiting for an agent, test run, CI, feedback, etc), and especially since the panny-D, private and work have more and more started to mix. I'm aiming to be at the office more often but it's very easy to not go there since there's rarely any compelling reasons to do so. For me, anyway.

My digital workspace is a complete mess. Tabs keep piling up, whether in Chrome, Notepad, or other apps. I don't even know why I still have so much old stuff open, I'm thinking I might need it one day, but that day never comes...

But in contrast, my physical workspace is completely empty, I might be a bit schizophrenic.

> Tabs keep piling up, whether in Chrome, Notepad, or other apps. I don't even know why I still have so much old stuff open, I'm thinking I might need it one day, but that day never comes...

I do this. But every now and then, I have what I call "The Purge", in which the browser window gets closed. There are a few tabs that survive The Purge. One window has [GMail, Calendar] as pinned tabs. Another window has [Gmeet] as a pinned tab. Everyone else is expendable. If they are needed, they will be reopened.

(I do give a little thought to it. "Is there some actually ongoing thing I realistically need to save, and can't reopen?" Those tabs might be pulled off.)

I did this this week. "This will close 437 tabs. Are you sure?" Purged.

If your work doesn't revolve around a web browser, try closing it completely when you try to do work. It might actually feel unsettling to work without having the browser open, almost the same feeling as reaching for the phone to check emails even though you know there are no new ones.

I recently realised I can do 70% of my work with only the terminal open and nothing else. Can get it up to 95% with terminal + single IDE at a time. The last 5% is browser-based, which can get distracting really fast - like HN and youtube rabbit holes.

If you really want to shine a light on the cockroach that is digital hoarding, try nuking your entire browsing history and tabs, delete all your movies/series/games collection. I 'cured' myself of being this kind of hoarder just before covid started and I haven't had the urge to store anything besides some private/precious data. On my one machine I've explicitly set firefox to not remember tabs and to also wipe history/cookies/tmp data on every close. Feel weird the first week but then if you see someone else's browser with 100+ tabs, its like looking at one of those picture of a hoarders car that is filled with trash. I think on some level the brain likes this kind of trash hoarding, some kind of rat behaviour. I jest but I hope you get the picture.

What you could do is just export all open tabs into a list, store that somewhere, and close all. You're not closing them because of anxiety that you'll need them, or because you're feeling bad that you haven't dealt with them, or likely a bit of both. This way, if you really need to, you can get back to them. You won't, but you can.

I’ve always have wanted a clean project area on my computer, never managed it though.

I try to keep a space for organization (slack, jira, whatever) and another for the ide, for example. Start working, and pretty soon I need to check an old pr on GitHub, and see it side to side with the ide, next someone sends a link in slack that opens a chrome window which is a doc with links that go into tabs. Hold, I have to hop in zoom for the daily… aaand we’re back at 20 windows and 15 tabs.

I wonder if it’s just the mess imposed by modern workflows. Picturing an engineer decades ago working alone and disconnected in its own office sounds like a dream, but I might just be idealizing it from today’s mindset.

Multiple desktops in Windows can help with this. Ctrl+Win Right/Left cursor keys to switch.

I cant stand it connecting app instances into 1 group. If i have 2 excel files open on Desktop 1, and then i try opening 3rd on Desktop2 -> it will jump back to Desktop 1 and open it there.

I mean that's the easiest thing for me.

    mkdir NewProject
    cd NewProject

That’s just a directory? I don’t see how it relates at all to what I described.

Blank slate physically and clear next step mentally works for me.

I read a quote one time that the best way to keep up daily effort is to always stop when you're the most excited about what comes next. When it's obvious.

Tarantino by way of Hemingway, I think.

I believe we clutter our workspaces because we suck at keeping iterations short. We always want to add one more feature, tweak one more thing, etc.

Eventually, some external pressure (boss, client, IM, whatever) causes us to open a second context simultaneously. Then it happens with a third, a fourth, etc

This is happening because the world is expecting shorter and shorter time to results due to better tooling in the last 10 years, but most have not figured out that all the LLMs and agents in the world won’t shorten the loop, only the person using them can do that.

I find that for any given problem, if I don’t see results in 30 minutes, it’s time to stop that problem and likely reshape it. If I don’t actually get the result in 90-120 minutes, I’m doing something wrong.

A thing which happens to me very often: I realize I'm experiencing a very real visceral discomfort nagging at me in the back of my mind.

It happens because I will have ctrl+c'd something several minutes ago. My mind subconsciously "holds" onto the info that I have text copied in my clipboard. It's only when I ctrl+v it and consciously discard it does the nagging go away.

I have no idea why it happens or if others experience this too. But I fully agree with the author about starting from nothing and getting rid of the clutter you think isn't bother you but which you're probably subconsciously holding onto.

I have the opposite problem. I often forget what the last thing I copied was, or whether I copied it, and have to go back multiple times to get the copy + paste achieved. A clipboard history would help me, too, but thus far I've been unable to make using one a permanent part of my toolkit (I'd have to remember the history exists).

That said, copying and pasting (and the attendant switching between windows/tabs) does often feel like one of the biggest cognitive frictions I have to deal with in any given day. That's a nut I'd like to crack one day.

One thing that has helped me the most in that regard is Alfred's multi-clipboard feature, where I can append to clipboard, which means I can copy-paste N links in N+1 actions instead of N*2 actions.

I've been using clipboard history for several years now. I could not go back. I realised it released an unknown continuous pressure on my brain I wasn't aware of.

Happens to me too. Especially when a secret token or API key is on the clipboard, then all senses are heightened until I replace it with something non-sensitive.

Yea, I have this too. It sometimes reminds me about the thing I was doing before I got distracted.

Fine for some people. For others like me, I just don’t see what others see - I don’t see the clutter or the mess, and I just get on with the job. Takes all types to make the world run, but it would be nice if these kind of articles acknowledged they might be pushing ideas onto people who really don’t need them (and for whom, what they’re proposing might actually be way worse as it zaps a load of time and energy doing the pointless clearing up).

It takes me longer to clean than it does for me to make a mess, so if I always start with a clean workspace, I will spend more time cleaning than working.

Every morning I close all work browser tabs from prior day. 99% of them I don't need again/can just reopen if I need. The 1% I'll note on a todo list or keep open somewhere.

My office mate turns off his computer every night when he leaves, turns it back on again in the morning. Annoys the admins because they like to schedule updates at night.

I do this too. And start the day with a `sudo nixos-rebuild boot --upgrade` and reboot if needed. Feels so fresh, like rebooting the brain.

Having the right context is far more effective. Context-switching cost is a major component of procrastination. At least for development work, having the right set of tabs open, the right project loaded in the IDE with the right console windows open is far better than "Nothing".

I think that's sort of what I got from the article - open the right tools for what you're actually working on, not everything you might need for all the tasks in your backlog.

You can go one further and start with no desk. Think out your solution while you go for a walk.

Every Friday, I close every app and turn off my laptop. I have been doing it as a ritual to fully enjoy my weekend. When you close your laptop lid, you leave your thoughts on the desk with it. Go meet your people.

My secret was vibe coding my own jira type if system. It makes sense to no one, but it feels very intuitive to me. It has features like caching all my google docs shared with me so I can search by title. Ironically, it works better than google drive’s search.

Anyway I did this because our version of jira isn’t great, so all the features I found complicated, I put that in my system. For the rest, I use jira because with other things it’s really intuitive.

I did something similar in Django for an overview of analyzed datasets. It's messy, does not have all the tests and still runs in development mode. But man did I set it up quickly and man does it help me keep an overview/find stuff fast.

Clearing my tabs and IDE is also the best way to lose context and miss all kinds of things I've had queued up.

Then perhaps list of tabs or recently open files is not the best way to stay organized.

A bit too obvious to make a comment about it, no? You have zero information about my workflow & needs. Maybe browser & IDE tabs works perfectly for me. They are all persistent across restarts, and searchable.

For me the process which works is the "make a mess, then clean it up" approach. Also known as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Diamond_(design_process...

Yeh, same. I also have a strong “do it now” attitude to try and reduce as much fluff as possible. I know a lot of people where they will add sending an email to the bottom of their very long todo list and it basically won’t get done. It takes two minutes, just DO IT when someone asks. In fact when someone asks me anything at work I drop everything, find the answer, and my next reply to them will be with the answer. I know context switching can be tough but other people are your portal to how your perceived in the outside world so they should be treated as priority. People appreciate this and you’ll be loved by your colleagues. Then you can go back to the optimisation rabbit hole you were half way down that probably wasn’t 100% asked for by the client anyway if you’re being honest.

> The next time you begin your workday, try this: clear your work surface completely.

I prefer to clean my workspace at the end of the workday and to leave a clearly defined task for myself the next morning. I can deal with a lot of friction after noon. Not so much at 6am.

Maybe this is why I still prefer working with a very vanilla vim setup, when I start with a coding task, I have to think for a moment about what files I need to work in and start by opening one. There is no IDE with 5 files already open. I do sometimes cheat and put a TODO comment in some files so that `git status` helps me remember where I left off previously.

Another thing that I've enjoyed a lot is a browser plugin called OneTab, when I start a new task or context switch I just hit the button and all the browser tabs are saved and closed. I then go through the list and only open up the tabs relevant to the task or I just start from scratch.

Someone called my method “chaotic neutral”

I try to start most days on my machine by closing almost everything I had opened the previous day.

I have started to do this in real life where I get a sudden feeling of urgency (that I am needed somewhere or have to check for messages from my team or respond to the CEO's text). As soon as I catch it, I press both feet down firmly on the ground for just a few seconds. It immediately calms me down. Stop and smell the roses, as they say.

I find myself doing this a couple dozen times a day.

Funnily, this is how I work, exactly.

I want to believe that by getting back on track from nothing to where I left off already helps a lot to understand the problem at hand, and maybe realizing issues that before prevented me of finishing the task.

Not to mention that "losing things" is basically impossible in digital tasks: browser history, version control, file system, etc. Losing things is not a tech problem, it's organization problem. And starting with nothing is a great organization habit.

This is one of the foundations of GTD. Basically, everything in its place, everything has a place. The linchpin is trusting your storage and recall systems.

“But I will lose my X" Some may object that they cannot have a clean desk because they'll lose things. They fear cleaning up…

I intensely dislike the authors smug self satisfied sense of superiority.

the author is either glib or autistic enough to opine on a clean desk as beyond reproach , i give him the benefit of the doubt and distill the idea that an empty context window offers more room

My work day starts with "what must I accomplish today?"

Then I tackle that list.

Sometimes the list changes.

"Focus work" happens as pressure vs desire mingle.

The real question is "what is expected of me in the next four hours?" And suddenly my work is structured.

An acquaintance of mine calls their system, “Two-Do.” They figure out 2 things that must get done each day and then do those 2 things and sometimes repeat if time and their energy allows.

The problem most of us have isn't clutter per se, it's that we never switch modes

Not everyone works the same way. These ideas surely will work well for some people, but there are others who feel utterly blocked by a clean workspace and need some clutter to get them rolling. There are also people with various types of neurodivergence who have their own unique needs. Arguably, people who need complete cleanliness to get work done fit into that category as well, and I include myself in that category.

I'm sure the author wasn't trying to tell the whole world to "Do it my way.", and was just offering some advice on one thing that worked for them. But it would read so much better if they wrote it that way, instead of writing it all about telling "you" how to organize your work.

This is my focus protocol. Whenever I find myself having trouble trying started on a task, I create a new desktop and open windows related to the task only. DnD on. Pick a next step. Execute.

What works for me is that often on a Monday I restart my machine. If something is truly important, I save it before the restart. There is something good to start from an empty state.

Wonder how many people don’t even shut down their work computer.

I shut down work computer every day and every day in the morning I start it up.

Sometimes if I really have something I didn’t finish and want to start on early in the morning then I leave it running with all apps open.

The Windows Update lady comes in once a month to give me a clean working surface.

I like to force myself to restart my computer and work desk every day.

I do this reset for my business side work, my programming project repo and my clinical work (I'm a kid physician).

I feel It both liberates me and at the exact time forces to understand my workflow and think of logical folders and separation of responsabilities. If something doesnt belong anywhere, maybe It is ephimeral and deserves to be erased... Though, but practical and I LOVE It.

But why should you ? I just do this if a new MacOs Version is installed.

Co workers always have issues like their WiFi being crap, all kinds of other issues.

Once they reboot all goes away.

If they would reboot once a week they would save couple hours of cursing and being annoyed every week.

This is highly subjective; not everybody is wired the same way. What looks chaotic to some is normal to others.

Some people are just naturally a bit chaotic and actually thrive on that for creativity. Others can't think straight until they first clean and organize everything around them. This can relate to the physical world but it also extends to planning and the state of things in software projects. I spend a lot of time staring at screens. The distinction is not that relevant to me.

I have a thing that I call problem inception where it's normal for me to start fixing one thing discover another thing in the process that also needs fixing and so on. I sometimes find myself four or five levels deep before being able to climb out and fix the thing that I was supposed to fix. It's fine. But it's hard to estimate and plan this. Solving hard problems is almost impossible without getting good at keeping track of such problem dependency graphs and getting structured about dealing with chaos and uncertainty.

Part of my process is another thing which I think of as "immersing myself in the problem" which boils down to embracing the chaos rather than trying to contain it. Patterns only emerge from chaos once you fully grasp it.

And another thing at play here is spatial memory. Your desk might look chaotic to others but once you have internalized the chaos, you kind of know where everything is. Chaos is just complexity you don't understand yet.

And sometimes there's just too much chaos and cleaning it up is actually exactly the right thing to do. I deal with technical debt and other gardening type issues when I get stuck. Often that unblocks me.

Lab diaries are also very helpful to track the provenance of ideas/inventions.

Clean your desktop and home folder first and then preach to me for my physical surroundings, bro.

You can also use this to set yourself up for success at the end of the day by closing/zero-ing out everything, and then just starting the first thing you need to do the next day. Then when you start work the next day, you've already got a feeling of momentum because your space is clear, your focus is set, and you've already started the task.

I literally just started doing this yesterday. Sometimes the tabs I have open help and sometimes they don’t. Yesterday they didn’t.

It's one of the ways. Trick is to discover what works for you

Um, I guess this might useful to some number of readers, but I don't think it's universal and I don't think it's a secret—more like its one of a few dozen pithy focus hacks that regularly make their way through the blogosphere and social media for those interested in "productivity".

To try my hand at reductive advice, I would say this: know your strengths and what work you do has the most value. The structure exists to serve the work and not the other way around. Habits and processes can serve the work, but can quickly become a form of procrastination for certain types of personalities. Reading about productivity on the internet will not generally make you more productive. Only through honest self-reflection can you actually improve your personal productivity and impact.

I like it when my managers assigns the work to me and specifies the order to be completed in.

Working in a university library always feels refreshing for this reason

Microsoft Outlook and Team are about the messiest places on my desk.

I feel like there was a whole Clean Desk movement long enough ago that I remember reading about it in Dilbert back when that comic was very of-the-moment and present in the culture

I personally find the same approach very effective. It forces me to know where to look for things, and to document things because I cannot hold onto the fiction of being able to hold it all in mind.

But the real advice here is "think about what you're doing". Any system, whether it's "clear your workspace" or "arrange absolutely everything so its visible" probably works, because you're acting deliberately.

Meh. This just sounds like all the interface theory stuff we users have to deal with, where useful things are removed in favor of a 'clean' and empty interface that makes you work harder to get your actual work done.

Then there's Adobe who remove features to add feature and justify it's next version; or clones it into a separate product so they can justify it's next subscription rise; or moves it into a different product so they can justify it's subscription expansion.

The website doesn't work it's just a black screen

I bet this works because of the way insta and fb work.

I second this

I can’t overemphasize the number of times I happened to end up walking outside in nature, most recently sledding, and suddenly had clarity on some next steps for a solution I was working on… not just nothing on your desk but no desk! It’s so hard to remember, especially in winter, but it feels closer to real magic than anything running on a computer even in the age of “ai”!

Start with nothing The next time you begin your workday, try this: clear your work surface completely. Close all browser tabs. Create a fresh page in your notebook. Open only the one file you need.

Has this person not heard of Chrome Profiles?

Github Repos?

Just start a new one. Don't clear your desk every time. For the techniques out there, this is like Javascript Promises that use one stack instead of Fibers, that uses many stacks.

I've heard 100 of these kinds of ideas. None are scientific enough for me to change. Many contradict each other.

Cool you found a system that works for you.

I don't get flustered by chaos, and cleaning/organizing is a waste of time.

I had to write a systemd script to reset my Firefox state on each reboot. It was really good at recovering sessions, and no config option could disable it.

Having grown up in an environment where a lot of things were stored "just in case" around me, I've arrived at a similar approach, albeit more on a "general principle" than a process level.

Work surfaces are empty, unless work is in progress. Storage areas are for storage, don't mix. Consider access frequency and where you would look for it first, when choosing where to store items. When seeing something out of place while everything else is put away, it's a nice trigger and motivation for cleaning / fixing / organising. Otherwise I turn passive.

This applies to both starting projects, physical items / surfaces, digital spaces, inboxes and de-facto task lists of various types.

However, it sometimes feels almost like a compulsion, a way to procrastinate. "I cannot start unless all of is clean". Just looking for a sense control to manage the stress I may feel about a task or a situation.

For me it is hard to not think of an object (physical or virtual) when it is in front of you, so I need to keep my line of sight empty and only "see" the items I need to work on, or are otherwise immediately relevant. Depending on stress level this "need" may go deeper and I "want" to empty the other spaces as well, even the previous steps of the current project that I'm working on.

Is this making me less effective in messy environments or does the general stress reduction and focus help compensate for this?

Also, this approach doesn't seem to be as universally good as the article seems to express. Knowing a few people with diagnosed ADHD, I've understood that they also may have a different sense of object permanence.

For them, it may be hard to think of an object / item unless it is in front of them, so keeping all the "relevant" items at hand and in the line of sight is useful. Otherwise they may have trouble getting into the space mentally. Like people who tend to buy too much of a same item because they've forgotten they have a bunch in the cupboard.

In the same vein, at work I've also have had trouble getting other people to agree with having focused lists in our task system. For example, showing only the new items when we need to triage new things, or having a way to isolate (a specific status step) for items that got pushed back from the development to analysis and will need to be clarified.

Instead, they seem to prefer having longer lists to maintain a "full view" of what's going on. At the same time I see that some then do predictably get distracted and / or need to scan through the same items each time because they are in the same list. Not sure how to best deal with that so I've opted for isolation for now. I have my own filtered views and during the relevant meetings I bring them up so they can find them in their bigger lists manually. Perhaps they have a lot better mental filters than I do.

The balance could be to somehow start empty, but allow for the "mess" of relevant items during the project and periodically prune the old stuff without thinking too much how to deal with the in-progress things as they are volatile anyway.

Yup been doing this for a while it works great, and really forces the work onto the organizational layer and search layer. Now if only I could be better at that.

Why does a personal blog need a comically large cookie spam popup?

Seriously. It was so ridiculous I actually looked and the site doesn't even set cookies (nor should it -- if a personal blog has a cookie banner, you fucked up and are doing something wrong).

It does bizarrely use two Google Fonts. Stop using Google fonts people. These aren't even good fonts.

First thing: open a notepad window and brain dump your todo list. The rest is moo.

Why not just say "reboot machine when done" if that is what you mean?

It explains what it means.

Oh look another article of “this works for me therefore it must work for everyone else”

As opposed to what? "Here's my 40k sample double blind study on productivity"?

As opposed to literally anything else? Not doing that?

You ok?

If only there were some middle ground between those extremes

You know what works for me? Read these kinds of articles, and then immediately get to work just to prove the guy wrong.

I'm quite pumped.

Incredibly naive take

Because you’re so busy and what you’re doing is soooo complicated?

"Some people say a cluttered desk is the sign of a brilliant mind. Hogwash. A cluttered desk is the sign of a lazy mind." —Tim Bryce

He didn't do any actual proper engineering; might take advice from politicians on engineering next

Hogwash. False dualism is a sign of a lazy mind.

Tidy desk, tidy mind. Empty desk, empty mind.

The end of every night should start with an empty page

and then start every morning with an empty page

It's pretty simple.

As a data hoarder something like onetab is amazing, there is still a lot of room for improvement though in browser ergonomics, session resets that force you to log back in and refind your place, it's nice to see some tools like data bricks that will at least let you reauth in a new tab.

So I'm one of the people who shuts down their computer at the end of the day and starts fresh. I don't use any type of session resume at the OS level or in the browser, I don't like it.

But! I've learned to harness the power of ending the day without complete closure. I stop work when I know the next step I'm about to do fully. Then the next day it's completely obvious what to start with, and I'm back in the flow without procrastinating as much.

It took some attempts to get comfortable with this; NOT finishing can be kind of excruciating if you're not build for work/life separation. But once I learned to delay my gratification in this regard, I found it set me up for many other things that require daily habits. I also balk much less at "this will take daaaaays" scenarios in general. I'm more comfortable now with things that stretch over longer periods.

Fellow shut-down-er? :P

I somehow started doing this from the very start of my computer interaction, so I never understood why people find it weird. But now if I keep my system on, I feel uneasy, as if I have work pending, so I am make sure to shut it down at the end of day everyday :)

I'm like that too. Sometimes I work for too long and go for dinner, get kids to bed etc... And then take some time to shutdown the computer. Sometime I write myself a note in a readme of the current task. But I close every window on every desktop manually (inc browser which start with clean session), thinking about if I still need anything from it. Then relaxing can begin.

nice blog site!

rm -rf ~

What I meant was that this article got me thinking I should just delete my entire hard drive on a regular basis so I can have a clean working surface.

Because I know that my downloads folder and my documents folder and my images folder and my source code folder are all enormous piles of crap.

And it does actually bother me, I just haven't thought of a solution to that.

One solution would be.. automated backups... and then every once in a while, just rm -rf ~

The idea of clearing physical and digital workspaces is part of the system discussed in Work Clean:

https://workclean.com/

I’ve been using a personal variation of this system for over 4 years now and it’s outstanding for me. I firmly believe that for the vast majority of people (myself included), working without a plan is one of the dumbest things they can do.

Yet another text blog that doesn’t work without Javascript.

What kind of sick mind does it take to ensure a straight blog post requires Javascript?

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