In the spirit of David Allen’s Getting Things Done I have, in the last year or so, been essentially iconless on my desktop. I have come to think of my desktop as a sort of inbox where any icons piling up are just unprocessed or not-dealt-with information (a.k.a. clutter) that decreases my productivity. Besides all this efficiency stuff, a desktop full of seldom used icons just bugs me.

Besides the handful of shortcuts most people used daily, the desktop tends to act as a graveyard for the useless triple or quad icon installs that are common with many programs. Whenever I use someone else’s computer and I see a Free AOL icon from their latest AIM upgrade it makes my skin crawl. Why are these icons installed and, even worse, why don’t people delete them?!

In addition to installed shortcuts, an unattended desktop tends to collect many downloaded or created files that either need to be moved to an appropriate folder or, in most instances, just deleted. I often use my desktop as a place to temporarily house files while I’m working with them (i.e. inbox), but I try to always clean it out before I leave the computer. Many times I have found old files on my desktop and I can’t remember where they came from or if I need them any more.

How To Do It

I have long since stopped using my desktop as a place to keep shortcuts to frequently used programs. There are few people who commonly use more programs than can be easily housed in the Quick Launch toolbar on the Windows XP taskbar. If you can see in the image above I have 6 icons as shortcuts on my taskbar, and I could easily house more without encroaching too much on the rest of my taskbar. I think the Quick Launch toolbar is one the of the most underused features of Windows along the Show Desktop button which is included in the toolbar.

By default, the lone icon that comes installed on the XP desktop is the Recycle Bin. The only way I have found to remove this is by using the TweakUI utility. It is part of a suite of PowerToys distributed by Microsoft which also includes other very useful utilties such as Image Resizer and Power Calculator. TweakUI has an easy way, under the Desktop section, to turn on and off all the common Windows desktop icons including the Recycle Bin. One thing to note, before you remove the icon from the desktop it is necessary to make a shortcut in the Quick Launch bar or from wherever you are planning to access it.

Besides getting rid of the standard Windows icons it is just a matter of looking through your icons and deciding which shortcuts are really needed and, if they are, then make a shortcut in the Quick Launch toolbar. As far as the random files go: file the ones you need to keep in an appropriately labeled folder and delete the ones you don’t need.

Follow all of these steps and you will realize why the default Windows XP background is appropriately named Bliss.