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Nimble Design - /the/path/of/most/resistance:

Unfortunately for the average person, the file system is so complex that everything outside of the desktop and the documents folder appears to be a vast labyrinth which most likely hides booby traps and minotaurs.

That’s because it does hide booby traps and minotaurs.

Let’s just say I tell a client “That ‘Home’ folder is where all of your stuff is. The Mac likes it when you store stuff in there. Use it to store your stuff.” So of course, they put all of their documents in the Documents folder, All music in Music and all eBooks in the Library folder. Then, they go in there and see all of this other stuff and start moving it around, throwing it away, etc. Then, the next time they restart they wonder why nothing is working right. Booby Trap!

So, instead, I have to say “Well, you can touch this but don’t touch that. This is your stuff but this other thing that, while it is your stuff, you can’t touch because it will break things.” With all of that confusing and conflicting information, of course they are just going to save everything to the Desktop and never move it. It’s easier and there is not chance of “breaking” anything. No booby traps.

This a great read but, if you have been paying attention, it is nothing you have not heard me hammering away at for a while now.

(thx DF)

It’s always interesting to see when people are asking the same questions as you are. In this case: what would be the most simple simplest chair possible?

Grycja Erde, a 23 year old student at the Academy of Design and Arts in Kharkov Lviv, Ukraine, set out to create just that. This is her concept.

Desk! (via IFGD)

Lovely.

Simple Desktops:

I have actually linked to this site before (Oct. 19 2009 to be exact), but people keep pinging me about it every time any other blog mentions it so I’ll link to it again.

On this site, I embrace a 400-word limit (unless it doesn’t make sense). It forces me to be concise, to focus on smaller topics, to choose the important, to be creative.

Yes: constraints force us to be creative.

Often, constraints, limitations, are seen as a negative, but to me they’re a feature. They might restrict freedom and force sacrifices, sure, but they also force us to choose. And to work within and around the constraints.

When we must work within limits, we have to figure out how to make those work. This forces us to think outside our normal mode of thinking, to think of new ways to make things work.

Consider:

• When we have a small home, we must find new ways of living within that small space, instead of being lazy and doing whatever we want with lots of space.
• When we must use fewer words, we must choose them wisely, instead of spilling them out carelessly.
• When we eat fewer calories, we must choose more nutritious and yet tasteful foods, to make them count.
• When we have less storage space, we must choose only the most important things, and make do with less.
• When we limit ourselves to four sentences per email, we must say the essential, creatively.

I could go on all day, but that would be contrary to my point. What constraints can you place on yourself, and how can you work creatively with them?

Today I deleted 1,031 friends from Facebook. It was liberating.

As I talked about before, having a ton of friends on social networks is a major pull on your attention, and results in superficial relationships anyway. I prefer deeper relationships when possible.

Facebook hasn’t worked well for me as a social network in the past. I loved connecting with close friends and family, and old friends from high school. But as I added friends without any criteria, it became too much — a stream of people leaving updates, sending me “gifts”, inviting me to all kinds of things, leaving things for me on my “wall”. I couldn’t stand it, and rarely checked Facebook. Twitter became my social space.

In the last month or two I’ve slowly been unfriending people on Facebook, a dozen or so at a time. It was a tedious process, so I did it in small chunks. But with more than 1,500 friends (at the peak), it would take all year to unfriend everyone.

So today, with the help of a reader on Twitter, I found a faster method: go to Account, then “Edit friends” and click the “X” next to people’s names. There was still an annoying popup confirmation dialog box, but with my mouse hovering over the “X”, and a finger on the Enter key, I could do it quickly.

It took me 36 minutes to delete more than 1,000 friends. My criteria: I only left actual, real-life friends and family, plus old friends from high school. I got down to 99.

Yes, I could have just deleted my account and started from scratch. But it would have taken me much more than 36 minutes to re-friend the 99 close friends, family & old high school friends again.

If you’re a reader or someone I know online, you didn’t make the cut. That doesn’t mean I don’t love you. It just means I had to find a more manageable way. I prefer communicating with you on Twitter, so feel free to @zen_habits me there if you want to send me a message. I prefer public messages over private DMs — it’s transparent and makes the most of the responses I type.

I really do love my readers. It’s just that Facebook wasn’t the way for me to connect with you.

Read more: How to Reclaim Your Attention