Posted on: February 5th, 2011 by Daniel Welcome! If you’re new here, you may want to sub­scribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

While anyone’s job is multi-​faceted and it’s hard to pin down in one sen­tence exactly what it is you do, my pri­mary func­tion at my job is to write lots of code. Whether you’re writ­ing desk­top / web appli­ca­tions, doing front end devel­op­ment or cre­at­ing mobile apps, a developer’s unbro­ken con­cen­tra­tion is one of their great­est assets. Hell, if you make any­thing, our atten­tion is an invalu­able finite resource.

Yet nearly every­thing about the modern work­place the setup of my Mac were con­spir­ing to steal that asset from me, bit by bit. While some dis­trac­tions are exter­nal and cannot be com­pletely con­trolled or altered, there are dozens of things you can do to reduce your cog­ni­tive over­head and focus on making some­thing truly great at work. It’s easy to start small and work up from there, find­ing a sweet spot for you.

The first thing I did was take stock of what apps were run­ning in my menubar – what value did these appli­ca­tions give me Things like Adium sit­ting in the menubar, flash­ing every time I got an IM, prob­a­bly not impor­tant. Same goes for what­ever Twit­ter app you’re using. Another item to quickly go are Growl noti­fi­ca­tions.

Just taking a few min­utes to really think about how much time I spend being dis­tracted by those little flash­ing, beep­ing, puls­ing indi­ca­tors every day made remov­ing those a simple chore. The second thing I did was hide the dock com­pletely reduced it to the 2D look. While ‘cool’, it takes up more real estate than the old 2D look and can be made much smaller with­out being unde­ci­pher­able.

Using a tool like Tin­ker­tool or the ter­mi­nal com­mand defaults write com. apple. dock no-glass -boolean YES, you can shrink the dock to a man­age­able size, thus free­ing up you screen for more work.

If you still feel like you need the dock for noti­fi­ca­tions and such, at least this way it’s smaller and stays out of your way a bit. On the sub­ject of the dock, any­thing that is sit­ting down there is just beg­ging to be clicked. A good exer­cise in prac­tic­ing min­i­mal­ism in any aspect of your life is to remove every­thing and slowly build things back up as needed.

So remove every­thing from your dock. Every last icon. See how long you can go with­out tools and apps that nor­mally sit in the dock and vie for your atten­tion.

I cur­rently have Omni­Fo­cus, Nota­tional Veloc­ity, Twit­ter, iCal, Mail, iTunes, Safari, Xcode, Coda, Pho­to­shop, Pre­view, Num­bers and Pages in my dock and it was pre­vi­ously double that size. After that, if you’re feel­ing saucy, get a bit more ambi­tious. Using a tool like AppZap­per (I rec­om­mend AppZap­per but I real­ize some folks wouldn’t pay for this), go through and remove appli­ca­tions that you haven’t used in over a year, or apps that dupli­cate func­tion­al­ity (Pho­to­shop, Acorn, Pix­el­ma­tor come to mind). Do you need all three of these taking up space on your drive It’s not so much about the phys­i­cal space you’re reclaim­ing, it’s about one less thing com­pet­ing for your atten­tion.

It’s about stay­ing focused and not having to make that split-​second deci­sion of “which app should I color-​correct this photo in ” that on it’s own is quite triv­ial, but hun­dreds of these thoughts about how to focus our energy add up over the course of a day. Another step that has helped a lot, and I know at first this sounds insane, but I’ve removed the clock from my menubar. The amount of time you spend look­ing at the clock, doing the math about how long until meet­ing x or lunch or what­ever else con­stantly has your atten­tion diverted to another source.

You still have clocks on the wall, on your phone and if you’re using iCal or Google Noti­fier, you’ll still get yelled at by your com­puter when it’s time for your meet­ings. You can finally just focus on code. I’ve also gone and removed book­marks from my tool­bar in my browser, so I don’t click on any ‘impulse bookmarks’ while doing work (in the past, I’ve had things like Instapa­per, Pin­board, email and such just one short click away). It was far too easy to click away from my work and get distracted.

None of this is rocket sci­ence, and I’m not imply­ing that you should never take breaks or should quit using chat, Twit­ter or any­thing else. It just means that you should do it on your terms, when you’re ready for a break – not the other way around. Focus when you’re sup­posed to be focus­ing and relax when you want to relax.

There are a ton of great sites about find­ing ways to reduce dis­trac­tion in our dig­i­tal lives and focus on making great things that have beaten these sorts of ideas into the ground. I was amazed, how­ever, at how much all of those little things added up and really help you focus on your work. Give it a try and once you reduce that mental clut­ter ye