Are you missing the point?

“Striving for minimalism on your Mac is not about removing everything from your computer. It’s about getting rid of the fluff that distracts you from achieving peaceful productivity. Removing items from your dock or desktop for the sake of minimalism misses the point. Minimalism is a means to an end. The end is the opportunity to really enjoy using your Mac.”

This was submitted by my friend Pat Dryburgh for our consideration and he is 100% correct.

My goal, with this site, is that it helps people be a bit more productive with their Mac. I hope it points to tools that might help with that - including ones already built into the Mac OS. I hope it challenges people to the idea that they do not need yet another tool to make their Macs better, and in turn their lives easier, they may just need the right ones - and only the right ones. I hope it challenges folks to think about what they really need from their computer and, also, what they don’t.

For example, if you write a lot, perhaps a way to reduce distractions with a tool like Writeroom may help. Perhaps you will never use all of additional features in a full fledged word processor, so why have them? Perhaps there is a tool like Bean that gives you just enough of what you need and no more. Perhaps TextEdit alone is enough.

Sometimes, I pose questions and ideas that I myself could not live with but, maybe might help someone else. Spotlight could not currently replace Quicksilver for me. I use many of the advanced Quicksilver features, like appending/prepending text, hourly. That said, I know there are many who have Quicksilver installed just to launch applications and open folders quickly. If that is the case, Spotlight will do a more than adequate job of that.

Simply cleaning up your desktop or dock will likely not make you more productive. That said, perhaps cleaning up the visual clutter will be less distracting and, therefore, more productive. The goal is not the cleaning but the reduction of distraction. It’s not about the “what”. It’s about the “why”. Please consider this idea whenever reading anything here and don’t miss the real point of all of this talk of minimalism, zen, enough, etc. It’s to help all of us be better.