How busy is your desktop?

Accidentally, I stumbled upon a thought provoking post with the following words:

If you’re really using your computer, your desktop should almost never be visible. Your screen should be covered with information, with whatever data you’re working on. I can’t imagine why you’d willingly stare at a static background image– or even a background image covered with a sea of icons. Unless you consider your computer a really expensive digital picture frame, I suppose.

Well said!

I haven’t thought much about this before, but suddenly I realized that I can strongly relate to the above statement.  My desktop is never visible.  And it was always a bit awkward for me to pick a background image (I know use slide show, which cycles through all images in my Pictures/ directory) or a set of icons (I have a few in the corners of my desktop, but I never click on them, cause I never see them) to place on my desktop.

I’m going to set it to a solid color right now.  And I’m going to remove the useless icons too.

What about your desktop?  Does it look something like this?

3 thoughts on “How busy is your desktop?”


  1. haha,
    I’m using Total Commander so it’s + 2 clicks more and the files are put in right folders and the desktop is clear (i mean full of folders) :D


  2. My desktop is the same. But I do use it. I find it is a great “dumping place”. You know, like when you have some loose papers in your hand you’ll automatically dump them on your desk. Then, when you need them later, you can just rummage through a million documents and it’s there (“I know it’s here somewhere, I’ll find it if it’s the last thing I do…”!) Then you can delete it later. Unless you’re like me that is, and never delete anything until you get a critical disk space message. :)


  3. David,

    I’m a pack rat, but I try to keep things off my computer. My Flickr account has more than 11,000 images. My Gmail keeps all my email since 2000 or so. I keep those rare office documents in Google Apps. I buy web hosting space to keep up the web site and store some backups…

    The other time my laptop crashed in the middle of the operating system upgrade and I had to reinstall from scratch, I was up and running in full speed 10 minutes after the install was finished. :)

    Keeping my desktop clean, surely helps me keep those things off my computer. It’s like storing all downloaded files in /tmp directory. It’s cleaned automatically. The important stuff I move somewhere else.

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