This is one posting in a series of blog postings, under the common heading of Apple Mac Productivity, that are aimed at helping people be more productive and effective in their use of the Mac. Anyone who can add useful feedback to any of these postings is invited to do so.

As regards PC users, the ideas recorded here may be useful too. Sometimes PC users will react with a “so what” when you explain how you can do stuff on the Mac. They are probably right to do so, in the sense that many things that make the Mac a productive environment can be done on the PC too. In those instances what usually makes the Mac different is that it’s a lot less trouble to do and it is likely there’s nothing going to stop it working. Most of the stuff I do for productivity on the Mac I tried to do on the PC but eventually gave up because it was never practical.

The Desktop

We’ve been used to calling the “naked PC screen” a desktop for well over a decade, which is strange because we never use it as a desktop. Imho, we should and on the Mac we can. By this, I mean using the desktop as a place where we carry out work and put the work-in-progress files.

Take a look at the screenshot on the right here. It’s the top right hand corner of my desktop in a clean state – which is what it usually looks like at the start of day or end of day. There are just three items on the desktop; a link to a Journler folder, an Images folder and a Projects folder. They are all folders and these folders have their own icons so that there’s no likelihood of me confusing them with any other folders that might appear on the desktop.

Let me explain how I work with these folders. The first thing to understand is the problem I’m trying to solve, because that determines exactly how you’ll structure the desktop if you imitate what I’m doing. The problem I’m trying to solve is:

I want all my files stored in an organized way.

Because I don’t work on sound or music files at all, I don’t ever have any work-in-progress sound files on the desktop, so I don’t need a sound files folder. The same is true for me of video, at the moment. I do work on image files in many contexts, but mostly for the web. So what I have on the desktop is; two folders for work-in-progress files, one for images and one (called projects) for text files and documents and also, a link to Journler which is my “archive store”

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