Justin Lloyd

Shoot The Messenger : Get Rid of Sidebar Gadget Clutter, Become More Productive, Waste Less Time, Concentrate Easier

Microsoft Windows Vista comes with an application that starts by default called Sidebar that displays various “useful” gadgets such as time of day in different time zones, current weather forecast, calculator, money exchange rates, stock quotes, and other trivia.

These sidebar gadgets add very little to your productivity and in fact most likely drag it down. The mental clutter that comes with the information trivia that the gadgets provide absorbs your available mental bandwidth you should be dedicating to other tasks. If you are always being distracted by the latest stock quote or financial market news and you are not a day trader or stock broker then having that gadget on your sidebar is a waste of time.

The Sidebar may look pretty, it might even be an interesting distraction, but the Vista Sidebar is just that, a distraction.

Do you really need to know the temperature in Santa Monica? Right now? On a minute to minute basis? Unless you are working out of a basement, it just is not that important, and unless you are planning on heading outside in the next hour or two, it is irrelevant to you whether it is windy, sunny or pouring with rain.

Do you really need to know how much CPU load there is or how much RAM is being consumed? The computer just works, when it gets slow, you can pop open Task Manager to check why. But having a gauge that tells you the computer is running slow is useless, you know if it is running fast or slow, this is just irrelevant information much like telling you on a constant basis how hot your CPU is. You need to know CPU temperature when it goes out of range or when your computer is suffering a series of crashes. That’s it. That’s all you need to know.

Do you really need to know what time it is with a fancy, constantly moving, animated clock? Everybody complains about things that blink, animate and flash on web pages but they seem perfectly happy to put this utter crap on their desktop and have it distract them. You want blinking, flashing, annoying, distracting, pointless junk, just go get the old punch the monkey advert and stick it up as your desktop background.

Slideshows? That’s right people, you can stare at all the crappy photos you have taken over the years of people you cannot recall ever meeting. No thanks.

Currency? Yes, you too can monitor the currency markets to see what the dollar/yen/pound is worth. If you need this information in your daily work a sidebar gadget is pointless, if you don’t need this information you are wasting both brain capacity and attention bandwidth on something that is pointless. Go think big thoughts and quit wasting your time with meaningless minutiae.

All of these attention guzzling gadgets, digital doodads and worthless whatnots waste your valuable time. Time that is utterly irreplaceable. You do not need these widgets of useless information. You have probably seen the boy racers in their utterly ridiculous Japanese ricer cars, some of the cars are equipped with a dozen or more dials across the dash that “inform” the driver of all kinds of useless trivia. It is not needed, trust me.

If you are driving an automatic vehicle all of the extra gauges and information is irrelevant to you.

If you are driving a manual (stick shift) vehicle then all you care about is how much fuel you have and what the engine revs are, maybe the engine temperature though really not that important unless you are racing the engine constantly, and perhaps actual speed if you care about not being pulled over by the police. Having ridden motorcycles for my day job and raced motorcycles on the track the only thing you care about watching is where the needle on the tachometer is and once you get a feel for your car you can gauge the velocity of your vehicle by doing the same thing and reading the engine revolutions.

That is how your computer desktop should be, mostly clean with very little in the way of pointless animated attention grabbing gauges and you just have a feel for how your computer is.

Shut down the Windows Vista Sidebar, remove mental clutter and just worry about the essential information.

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