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.)

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

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).

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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)

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.

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".

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Working in a university library always feels refreshing for this reason

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.

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.

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

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

No! Don’t touch my desk!

Well… I sometimes ask my wife to help me clean everything up. Somehow with her there, it eases the pain of erasing my haptic pan-spatial memory system.

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.

I second this

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

"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

Incredibly naive take

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.

nice blog site!

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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