A typical computer desktop?

Most people’s computer desktops fall into one of three categories:

Spartan/Minimalist - Perfectly clean with just a small handful of oft-used icons strategically placed.

Cluttered, chaotic and disorderly – icons on your desktop are analogous to sardines in tins, rarely, if ever cleaned up.

The Filing Procrastinator - You’ve tried, bless you, but you’re losing the cluttered desktop war. Most people fall into this category (to varying degrees) and I would include myself in that. I have a bout of desktop clearing every now and then but my clearing antics are always swiftly countered by a returning salvo of new icons/files flooding in.

If you fall into one of the latter two categories, this might be just the answer. You can download a blank version as a desktop wallpaper at the correct resolution for your computer which neatly divides up the available screen real estate into ‘zones’. While you might not be able to relate to all of them, most computer users must surely raise their hands to having some of this content cluttering their desktops.

I particularly like the ‘Side Side Projects’ area and I’m certainly incredibly guilty of having an overflowing zone of (legal) ‘papers you’ve been meaning to read for months’ sitting there right in front of me but continuously ignored. Also, for certain projects (particularly protracted ones) I often place a ‘to do’ list on my desktop though I frankly don’t know why I bother, for all the good they do! Moreover, I like (and can readily relate to) the subtle yet important difference in prioritisation between the content of the ‘to do’ list and the ‘to really do’ list. And yes, I’m guilty of usually having a ‘supposed to have done last week’ list which is far longer than it should be.

But best of all, an awful lot of my desktop clutter stems from the ‘stuff you don’t know what to do with but don’t want to delete’ category. After all, it might prove useful some day.