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 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)

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 find myself doing this a couple dozen times a day.

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 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.

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

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.

Cool you found a system that works for you.

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

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.

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.

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 intensely dislike the authors smug self satisfied sense of superiority.

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.

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.

It explains what it means.

I'm quite pumped.

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.

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.

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