Intro­duc­tion

Writ­ing on a Win­dows laptop is not easy; mod­ern oper­at­ing sys­tems do everything in their power to inter­rupt the writ­ing pro­cesses with annoy­ing popups, system-procedures and menus that just always man­age to get in the way.  Even­tu­ally, break­ing the con­cen­tra­tion needed to get on and actu­ally write some­thing!  Moreover, the inter­net is always right around the corner, tempt­ing you to check up on Face­book, ping your blogs, pop up the RSS feeds, the list is endless. 

Many pro­fes­sional writers have come up with some­what drastic meth­ods to beat this syn­drome.  Terry Pratch­ett, appar­ently, writes in his local lib­rary, Douglas Adams (may he rest in peace) used to lock him­self in a hotel in Brighton with his copy editor for two weeks at a time.  They unplugged from the net and from the world to write.

I can’t do that.

Cesca and I have been away for 7 months now, trav­el­ling the East.  We have vis­ited many coun­tries and have had to write in some very funny places such as on bumpy Viet­nam buses at mid­night, fast mov­ing Thai fer­ries, atop cold New Zea­l­and moun­tains and (in the case of what I am writ­ing now) in an Indian 2nd class train car­riage.  There are hun­dreds packed in here today and all the win­dows are open due to the oppress­ive heat and the plastic seating. 

Moreover, thanks to the eco­nomic melt­down and the Mum­bai ter­ror attacks, tour­ists are a little rare around here right now and sub­sequently we are get­ting a lot more looks than white folk would nor­mally encounter.  On top of this, every two seconds, someone tries to sell me something.

 

With so many dis­trac­tions around me, my Win­dows Desktop needs to be on my side!  It needs to be the place I escape to, not from.

Thus with the dint of much effort I have come up with a Zen Desktop that has improved my con­cen­tra­tion immeas­ur­ably.  It has toned down Win­dows by mov­ing icons out of the way, it uses simple addi­tional pro­grams to dis­play the import­ant inform­a­tion without requir­ing me to reach for the mouse and all are chosen for their speed and light­weight footprint.

It also has a back­ground image of the greatest con­cen­trator of all time, a man who is a les­son to us all of what humans can achieve if they could only get some peace!

I want to share a little of that peace with you.

Caveat

One thing before we start.  I am not so much writ­ing a total how-to guide, more show­ing what I achieved with a little work.  If this inspires at all then I have done my job.  Desktops are inher­ently per­sonal and many of the more tech­nical guides do not work – believe me I have tried most of them – so this is what is best for me and my inner peace and what pro­grams, con­figs and setups I used to achieve it.  Your own jour­ney may be dif­fer­ent and that is a good thing: because it makes you think about cre­at­ing a true arena of relax­a­tion in which you can craft that novel, write that blog, or simply ful­fil your tasks better.

My Zen Desktop

Where I go to get away, not where I want to get away from!

Thanks to

Firstly, and most import­antly, many of the funk and visu­als of this desktop are due to the ster­ling work of Kaelri who had been mak­ing great desktops and post­ing them on Lifehacker.com.  Mine uses some of the design from his “Enigma” setup.

Also, and with only one or two excep­tions, the pro­grams here are all open source: bonus!

Part 1 – Clean­ing Up

To start I have removed all icons from the desktop and forced the taskbar to auto­hide.  To per­form this simply cut and paste all your old icons into a folder.  Then Right mouse on the taskbar and chose prop­er­ties. Then select Start Menu tab, then the Cus­tom­ize but­ton.  Set the options in here to pre­vent Win­dows from dis­play­ing all the default icon options such as My Com­puter and Net­work.  Then select the Taskbar tab and select the option to auto­hide the taskbar.

Good­bye My Com­puter.

This gives the desktop so much more space, some­thing that is a premium on a laptop, and imme­di­ately removes all dis­trac­tions from the bot­tom right of the screen – those annoy­ing little pro­gram icons.  Don’t worry, the import­ant inform­a­tion we put back in bet­ter ways.  That done I added some programs.

Part 2 – New Programs

Start­ing at the top right, we have the always excel­lent Rock­et­dock from the Punk Soft­ware Team.  I have been using this for years and the latest incarn­a­tion is the best yet.  It is a very simple install. 

I also use a little plu­gin that allows you to have Mac OS style fol­dout menus.  The plu­gin is the Stack Dock­let and allows you to cus­tom­ise each stack into groups. 

To cre­ate a stack start a new folder and stick in what you want – yes I am a Nethack freak…

I have changed the default icon set to the Reflections_DOCK_by_styrizo that turns the nor­mal icons into small and neat groups of text.  Installing this is simple.  Copy over the new icons files into the dir­ect­ory with the cur­rent ones and overwrite.

Each rep­res­ents a com­mon group.  APPS con­tains my com­mon applic­a­tions (more later), COMP is the Win­dows Explorer, DOCS, PICS & DWNL (down­loads) are self-explanatory and WIP (Work in pro­gress) is my writ­ing folder.  Then we have my two most com­mon pro­grams: ITNS (iTunes) and GOOG (Google Chrome).  The BLOG stack con­tains all the folder links and applic­a­tions I com­monly use to man­age and write for my blog.  DVDP is full of applic­a­tions that enable Basho Films to exist on the road, such as Sony Vegas 8 and Clone To Go convertor. 

The Rock­et­dock I mod­i­fied to be smal­ler and placed in such a pos­i­tion that I can still access the up and down arrows of a full screen applic­a­tion when max­im­ised.  This is also the pos­i­tion that best suite my wall­pa­per.  If I had dif­fer­ent wall­pa­per, I might have put it on the top or bottom.

In the bot­tom right corner.  Here we are using Samur­ize, which is another bril­liant pro­gram that is, amaz­ingly, free.  I am using the basic Enigma setup with only a few tweeks.  Firstly, I removed much of the side­bar con­fig using the editor – this is very easy – and moved the clock over to the far left (strip­ping most of the graph­ical embel­lish­ments on the way).  Mak­ing changes in Samur­ize is very simple.  The editor is WYSIWYG and akin to using a paint pro­gram.  By select­ing the indi­vidual parts of the clock I could delete them and by draw­ing a box around the entire clock I could move all the ele­ments together as one.

Let’s change the clock’s minute hand colour?

The rest is vanilla Enigma.  It shows all the inform­a­tion one needs when writ­ing:  the cur­rent song in iTunes, the CPU and RAM util­isa­tion per­cent­age and the remain­ing bat­tery power (prob­ably the most vital piece of inform­a­tion on a laptop).  Finally, it shows the remain­ing space on the win­dows drive.

On the far left side.  This side is being gen­er­ated by a dif­fer­ent pro­gram called AveDesk 2.0.  This excel­lent desktop pro­gram allows you to use side­bar like wid­gets all over your desktop.  I only use the SysStats plu­gin (which is a sep­ar­ate down­load) and the ver­tical cal­en­dar down­load from the Avedesk web­site.  This I moved to the left and pinched a little to fit cor­rectly.  SysStats is a pro­gram that con­nects with the sys­tems internal work­ings.  It can show you almost any­thing about your sys­tem and is the engine behind many of the CPU Stats coun­ters that are com­mon to AveDesk. 

A simple solo wid­get con­fig doesn’t slow the com­puter – 20 wid­gets will!

This is only half the story. 

Part 3 – Zero Effort Security

Next, I have run the pro­gram Ulti­mate Win­dows Tweaker by Ramesh Kumar of the Win­V­istaClub.  This pro­gram enables all sorts of little tweeks that tame Vista’s annoy­ing alert and mes­sages.  The most import­ant thing to do is to turn off the ter­rible User Account Con­trol, which is like can­cer for concentration. 

UAC is gone.

To bal­ance out the reduc­tion in secur­ity I use the full ver­sion of ZoneAlam Pro.  But wait! Is that a pur­chased pro­gram?  Well, yes and no.  Yes, you pay for ZoneAlam Pro but no, I did not.  You see once a year for one day Check­point gives ZoneAl­arm Pro away free.  That’s right – free.  The day is around Christ­mas, so watch the blogs for it. 

My Anti Virus is AVG free ver­sion.  Easy.

With these two in place and with CCle­aner run­ning every time you boot, even surf­ing the dark side of the net is (rel­at­ively) safe (Caveat Emptor on that one!).

Part 4 – Writ­ing Irons

I also use a num­ber of smal­ler applic­a­tions to make my life smoother and easier.  Many pro­grams are not con­du­cive to clear minded writ­ing.  One such example is Microsoft Word.  For while Word is a very power­ful pro­gram, it is chock full of dis­trac­tions and a royal pain in the ass for bat­tery life.  Instead, I use the bril­liant Dark­Room. This simple editor is free on Source­forge and enables writ­ing with no menus or any­thing else to get between you and prose.  This is vital to noti­cing mis­takes and mak­ing you “hear” the writ­ing as though it was someone else’s, which is a real boon to proof reading.

Dark room in action.

When some­thing is writ­ten fully, only then do I spell check it.  I have an internal editor that works thusly:

1. Write it out in draft in Dark­Room without stopping.
2. Go and make a cup of tea/travel over the Laos border/Go out and get a beer with friends.
3. Import what you have writ­ten into Word/Windows Live Writer/Open Office.
4. Spell check, gram­mar check.
5. Now re-read it with fresh eyes.
6. Now read it aloud to yourself/your cat/your sig­ni­fic­ant other.
7. Ready to post?

Step 6 is the most import­ant.  It is vital, abso­lutely vital, that you read aloud your writ­ing.  All of it.  Also and here is the rub, you must read it in the most bor­ing voice you can manage.

Why?

I first heard of this tech­nique from Sol Stein in his bril­liant mas­ter­work, “Stein On Writ­ing.” 

In this book (which I have on my iPhone from Aud­ible) he takes you through the les­sons and teaches you the skill sets neces­sary to write well. 

Stein On Writ­ing – the Writers’ Bible.

Of all the tips, point­ers, and frankly great advice in this book, read­ing your work aloud in mono­tone is the best one.  What it sounds like in your head is not what it sounds like in mine.  The words must do the work and not your ima­gin­a­tion.  Also mis­takes and bad writ­ing leaps off the screen this way.

Part 5 – Speed Research Browsing

My browser choice is Google Chrome because it is super fast.  To com­ple­ment that I use the applic­a­tion TabsLock, which turns the CAPSLOCK key — a key no body uses — into a quick boot for Chrome.  There­fore, whenever I press it I get a new Chrome tab.  Again, this removes the need to stop the flow of writ­ing by reach­ing for the mouse.  If I need to look some­thing up on the net, I simply hit CAPSLOCK and Chrome opens a tab with the cursor in the search bar.  Search­ing is much quicker if you are not in con­trol of the mouse; I do not drop from the “zone” and am not temp­ted to click Facebook.

Part 6 – Friends

Then we come to the most com­mon dis­trac­tion, friends.  These days, “friends” and “Acquaint­ances” have become one thanks to Face­book and Twit­ter.  I had many friends before, I have almost too many now.  On top of that, I have my web­site com­ments thread to trawl through and many many for­ums to read.  If I give these applic­a­tions an inch, I can spend days on them.  In addi­tion, the vari­ous pro­grams and wid­gets that pur­port to make Twit­ter and Face­book easier are frankly very distracting. 

Instead, I use a mas­ter pro­gram to con­trol them all: Dis­gby.  This excel­lent little applic­a­tion con­sol­id­ates all my Gmail accounts, twit­ter account and Face­book accounts into one self-hiding side­bar.  Popups from the applic­a­tions are small and in the bot­tom left corner of the screen where they do not inter­rupt my flow.  With Digsby, I have found a way of keep­ing these applic­a­tions open without tak­ing a break.

Part 7 – Wallpaper

Finally, I have a pic­ture of the Buddha him­self.  This is from a temple in Nha Trang Viet­nam, taken by me.  It is part of a col­lec­tion of Buddha wall­pa­pers that I am put­ting together and will be releas­ing as a down­load­able set with all dona­tions going to par­tic­u­lar orphan­age in Cam­bodia Cesca and I vis­ited dur­ing our time there.  The col­lec­tion will con­tain top qual­ity, wallpaper-worth shots from all the major Buddhist temples in Laos, China, Japan, Viet­nam, Cam­bodia, Thai­l­and and Singa­pore. I have some great shots already and all taken live, none are web searched.  This col­lec­tion will be impossible to rep­lic­ate unless you track my jour­ney around the world.  I have even been to temples deep under­ground that no one goes to, temples that mil­lions go to and all sorts of super strange stuff in between (like the crazy Cao Dai temple in South­ern Viet­nam). If you are inter­ested then check back, sub­scribe to my web­site or fol­low me on Twit­ter and I will announce when they are ready.

The base image for this par­tic­u­lar wall­pa­per is here, you are wel­come to it:

Big B leads the way.

Con­clu­sion

I hope this art­icle has spurred your think­ing about what you can do to reduce clut­ter on your com­puter desktop to enable your writ­ing.  If you are like me, then you have many pro­jects that need tend­ing to; if only you could focus.  With this new desktop you can ban­ish pro­crasti­ation and get on with them!   With the right tweaks, your Win­dows desktop will become an oasis of calm and your study area away from the world; a great place to unwind with a good book: yours!

 

Regards,

 

Basho

 

 

Also, if you have any tips you want to share with us: please let us know!

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