

Turn off the clock on your menu bar - scootklein
http://scottkle.in/turn-off-the-clock-on-your-menu-bar

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jkahn
I'm sure this idea will help some people become more productive. Not people
like me, though. Maybe I just get easily distracted, but I make small deals
with myself when working through a mundane (but important) task.

Deals like:

\- "15 more minutes and you can get a coffee".

\- "You can't look at HN until 4pm".

\- You get the picture.

A clock helps immensely with this. Sometimes a task feels like it's taking
forever, but it's only been half an hour.

~~~
fabiandesimone
For those that have a hard time keeping commitments like yours: "You can't
look at HN until 4pm"

StayFocusd for Chrome is incredible.

It has boosted my productivity tenfold.

~~~
alfet
Damn! thats exactly what i needed. The only problem i have with it is that
realizing how much I needed something like it makes me feel dumb hehe

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m0th87
Sadly enough, I did this when I worked at $BIG_CO, not so much because it
improved my productivity, but because the day was excruciatingly long with a
clock staring at me in the corner. It helped a lot.

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trustfundbaby
Without a clock in sight ... I'd just spend the _entire_ day on Hacker News
and not even realize it.

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thwarted
The top portion is 309 words. The portion after the tl;dr heading is 386
words.

(used cat | wc to do the word count).

~~~
BoppreH
This is not the first time I see someone using "tl;dr" as "wall of text
incoming".

Think of it as "this is what you'll say when you see what's below this mark."

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rbritton
I actually use the clock for something other than time: it tells me when the
computer is bogged down/frozen. If the seconds stop updating, it means
something else is sucking the resources (usually some loop in the latest build
of whatever app I'm working on).

~~~
thought_alarm
I keep a CPU monitor in my menu bar for that purpose. If the CPU monitor stops
updating then I can be confident that I'm really screwed.

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petercooper
I went half-way with this and went to the analog clock. It's so ridiculously
tiny and hard to read that it takes effort.. so I usually don't bother. But
it's still there to click on and see the time if I need to check (the time is
added to the usual date item in the drop down if you go to analog).

~~~
benatkin
Good to know. I'm giving this a shot. (I already tried removing it entirely
for a few weeks and found that it was too much for me.)

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stevenklein
Something that I would add to that is have someone you trust change your
Facebook password (for the day, the week, until the weekends, however long).
If you're like me, it's not uncommon to log in ~5-10 times a day just for a
quick check. Doing so interrupts your flow the same way diverting your
attention to an upcoming event does. However, when you get in the habit of not
even being able to check it, that distraction disappears from your life.

~~~
mrschwabe
Dude seriously... do you really get someone to change your Facebook password?

~~~
charliepark
If he does? More power to him. Clearly, he sees that he's more productive when
that's taken away from him, and he's not letting it distract him from more
important things.

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MarkSimpson
So, I've now been trying this for I don't know how long (yeah, I mean that
literally) with interesting results.

I hid the clock on my taskbar, put masking tape over the clock on my landline
phone, and put my mobile phone face down and out of my reach. Then I set up my
scheduling program to remind me when it's lunch or home time.

But my mind! That little part of my consciousness where it used to keep the
time, it doesn't know what to put there any more. And it's freaking out about
it, too.

I never realised before this how much mental effort was dedicated to keeping
track of time. Now that I know, I'm definitely not going back. I shouldn't be
doing anything my computer can do as well as or better than me. That includes
keeping track of time.

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headsclouds
I agree with his approach with the clock, however I can't afford to be
completely lost time–wise, so I use an analogue representation of the time in
the menubar that is useful for finding out the current _relative_ time (I'm
pretty sure this is the only reason why it's there, since there is no way to
tell time accurately from it). Screenshot: <http://cl.ly/2W1L31370I380i130I0K>

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dweekly
Dude likes not having a clock, writes a TL;DR longer than article explaining
the same.

TL;DR It was an interesting exposition on the modern Man's relationship to
time an the surprising effect of detachment that results a Vegas-like visual
detemporalization of the visual environment, followed by further clarification
that exhibited a clear lack of understanding of proper summarization
techniques appropriate for an Internet audience.

------
forgotusername
Recently (and I suspect, at all times in the past) I've had trouble focusing
with even one epileptic app throbbing in the background, or even redrawing
some pointless animation or status update. For me one of the criteria for a
desktop program is whether it can be prevented from audibly or visually
disturbing me with its desires.

It may occasionally mean an impatient peer being upset at the lack of a speedy
reply, but my thoughts are guaranteed to be uninterrupted unless the
conversation is of sufficient importance to hold my attention after returning
to real work.

The only 'active' notifications I have are mail and calendar, on my phone,
which can be silenced temporarily with a single swipe. On the desktop, the
only notification is Adium's small, static icon in the menu bar, which raises
its wings to politely remind me of some ongoing IM.

I'd suggest disabling that almost pointless thermal monitor and the many
similarly looking distracting icons long before I'd hide the clock, as it's
the only reliable gauge of progress throughout the day.

------
pyre
I use XMonad as my tiling window manager, and I make judicious use of the
"toggle struts" shortcut. When 'docks' set themselves up at the edges of the
screen they define 'struts' (which are the areas that they intend to use) so
that normal windows can avoid them. Then they are toggled off in XMonad, the
tiling manager reclaims that portion of the screen, allowing the currently
displayed windows to cover the docks. This allows me to keep docks that are
informative, but reclaim that desktop space or just axe the visual clutter
with a Super+b ('Super' being the Windows or Apple key under Linux).

~~~
zmanian
Discovered the Avoid Struts toggle from your comment. Thanks. Been wanting
this since I switched to xmonad.

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NyxWulf
I don't have the clock turned off, but all of the other cognitive distractions
were removed long ago, particularly notifications of any sort. Sometimes I
forget how distracting that stuff was because it's the first thing I do when I
set up any new computer. For me, the clock isn't a distraction, but a popup
for any of the million things that can happen on the intertubes is
ridiculously distracting.

If I'm in focus mode, I'll also quit Adium, fire up think, and use Vitamin-R
to do a pomodoro session. Works well for me, YMMV.

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rmc
Totally agree. I did this about a year or so ago and it's great. For me I was
always looking at the clock in work, how long before lunch, how long before
home time, etc. It was quite distracting.

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BoppreH
Some time ago I took a few steps to remove all unnecessary clutter:

\- replace all desktop icons and docks with Launchy

\- remove all system taskbar icons

\- activate the GMail labs "unread counter on favicon"

\- trim down the browser to its bare basics

I'm quite pleased with the results: <http://oi53.tinypic.com/nmc4nr.jpg>

It makes my brain happy.

~~~
jackmoore
How did you remove the title from GMail so that only the favicon displays?

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stretchwithme
Very good advice. Giving it a try.

I read recently that stop bad habits, eliminate the triggers for the habits.
These are the things in your brain strongly associated with the undesirable
behavior. Seeing that clock could be one such trigger for many people.

Got rid of gmail notifier and also removed my last name from my user name for
a little less clutter on the toolbar. Turns out I knew what it was anyway.

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robgough
I'm giving this a go, though I must admit it feels weird not to have the time
to glance up to - so I'm not sure how long I'll last.

Perhaps all those souls brave/stupid enough to try this should all meet back
up in a week to discuss? :) We can share stories of missed appointments and
accidental late nights into the early hours, before we realize the time and
disappear off to bed cursing the OP :D

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mpapi
I started heading in this direction a few years ago, and now I'm running dwm
(<http://dwm.suckless.org>), no menu bar, with a couple of scripts that I have
to manually run to see things like the time or my unread email count. It did
take some getting used to, but I'm definitely more productive this way.

~~~
pyre
Heh. I was just thinking about creating something similar and calling it
'status,' but apparently Ubuntu has gobbled up that very generic command name
for upstart.

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jefe78
I like this idea. I have a 3 monitor setup(across 2 computers) using Synergy.
This affords me the luxury(distraction) of always having my IM
clients/browsers open. I've taken to using a focus/fader application so that
when I'm not on the screen, only my coding monitor is focused. It helps a lot.
I'll try killing the clocks next!

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knowtheory
The two things in my mac menubar i _definitely_ know i can do without are the
two things i can't remove:

\- Searchlight icon

\- TimeMachine icon

Everything else in my menubar is either removable myself, or indicate state
about my machine that i need to track (input mode, wireless connection, volume
level and the like)

~~~
shizcakes
System Preferences > (System Row) Time Machine > Uncheck "Show time machine
status in Menu Bar"

~~~
ugh
More to the point, every icon in the menu bar except for Spotlight can be
turned on or off in the System Preferences. If hunting down those checkboxes
is too much work, you can also Command-click on any of Apple’s icons [0] and
drag them out of the menu bar. This also allows you to rearrange icons. (That
works also for buttons on toolbars.)

Super User has a hacky way of disabling the Spotlight icon:
[http://superuser.com/questions/32593/remove-spotlight-
icon-f...](http://superuser.com/questions/32593/remove-spotlight-icon-from-
the-menu-bar)

[0] I only have one third-party icon in my menu bar (Dropbox) and it can’t be
dragged out of the menu bar. I don’t know whether that’s the case for all
third-party icons.

~~~
alextgordon
_I only have one third-party icon in my menu bar (Dropbox) and it can’t be
dragged out of the menu bar. I don’t know whether that’s the case for all
third-party icons._

It is. Apple has their own private API for their "menu extras" and actually
loads them into the windowserver itself. It's a major PITA to support one of
these things, so only a very small number of third party apps choose to do it.

The alternative public API is basically just a tiny window for each item
sitting in the menubar. There's no technical reason why Apple couldn't
implement the same kind of command-drag behaviour, but thus far they haven't.

------
joshcorbin
I use gkrellm in the top right corner, and a small vertical panel in the lower
right corner that has a clock and notification, nothing else.

I find that tucking the clock away in this place where my eyes scan to last
causes me to look at it very little except when I want to.

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wilbur-d
I no longer even use a menu bar at all. It took a few days to get used to it
but I don't miss it.

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AdamTReineke
At an internship two summers ago, I found the last few hours on Fridays took
forever, so I started covering the clock the corner of my screen with a post-
it note with a smiley face on it. It helped quite a bit. :-)

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RedReaper132
Because I have my bar set to auto hide I totally forget about time when I
work. Alarm reminders are great to remind you that you should take a break :)

------
eddanger
I need to see my clock so I can spend at least a good hour dreading the next
scheduled conference call!

