Yesterday, we began decluttering our desk. Today, we will declutter our desktop.

One of the things that drives me crazy is when I install a new program and it leaves all sorts of icons on my desktop. It also drives me crazy when I have all sorts of popup notifications in my Windows taskbar telling me everything that I don’t need to know. These are nonurgent situations presenting themselves as though they were urgent. It disrupts my life and it’s something that I finally decided to put a stop to.

I am not going to attempt to reinvent the wheel on this one. I have found some great articles that thoroughly go through processes for getting things organized. What I will recommend is reading through them, picking some things that work well for you, and discarding some that don’t work well for you.

Here are a few guides on how to do it:

• Five Steps To A Kinkless Desktop
• A 3-Step Cure For Digital Packrats
• Desktop Zen – Reducing Visual Clutter On Your Desktop

Of course, if you use windows and just love storing junk on your desktop, you can always Right Click > Arrange Icons By > Show Desktop Icons. Be sure it is unchecked, and all desktop icons are gone. But it has merely avoided the problem, rather than attempted to solve it.

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Joel Wagner

Joel Wagner (@sywtt) began teaching band in 2002. Though he had a lot of information, his classes were out of control. He found himself tired, frustrated, disrespected by students, lonely, and on the brink of quitting. He had had enough. He resigned from his school district right before spring break of his second year and made it his personal mission to learn to be a great teacher. So You Want To Teach? is the ongoing story of that quest for educational excellence.