My favorite productivity trick has got to be moving everything on my desktop into a folder to be looked at later and everything in my inbox into the ” refile” mailbox.

An empty desktop and a clean mail folder and all of a sudden you’re more productive.

I think the technical term for this is “pushing the reset button”, except in my version of it, there is no shutdown notification. (If I weren’t such a poser, I’d twitter it.)

I tried that today.

[The fallout after the jump.]

Due to some very aggressive e-mail filter rules and a hard drive crash a year ago, I only have 2957 messages in my ” refile” mailbox. (And some of you guys think it’s weird that I have 42,583 unread blog entries in my newsreader.) But my “-fix now” folder is 16GB and itself contains various fallout from previous resets in the form of folders titled with such helpful requests to self such as: “- deal with” “blog this” “now” “todo” “temp” “xx” and, of course my personal favorite, “Untitled Folder” and its cousins “Untitled Folder 1, “Untitled Folder 2”, etc. The oldest file in there is a zip archive titled “putthiswhereiwantit.zip.” and this does not include the hard drive where I collected some of my pre-crash stuff. (That’s some odd geekiness right there—where “the crash” refers to that time last year your primary hard drive and your backups failed at the same time.)

Going through this someday is going to be ugly.

Thankfully, God gave us Catholics purgatory.

At 15GB (67GB for the rest of my Home folder), at least, now I know why I don’t have enough room to install Parallels on my Mac Book (Yes, I’m the software architect of a top-100 internet company with a predilection for the front-end who has to hijack a coworker’s machine to view the damage in Internet Exploder.)

To solve the Parallels problem, I’ll just wait until notebook hard drives are get bigger.

It a shame I can’t do this in the real world:

Guess it’s time to go down to Home Depot and upgrade to a bigger house.

or

I’ll just throw away the vacuum cleaner, I can just google it if I need it later.

and I can’t tell you how helpful it’d be if I could just set up a Spotlight Smart Folder for all my mismatched socks.