10 Steps to a Visually Productive Desktop
I’ve found that one major downside to most GTD systems is that they are a bit too good at their core thesis of “out of sight, out of mind.” So good that at times I forget to consult my list and end up behind on my top priorities. The only escape from the cycle that works for me is to have my agenda and todo lists front and center at all times. The question is how to do it seamlessly?
Enter geektool. Geektool is a preferences panel for Leopard that allow you to layer text and images onto your desktop background in an effective and beautiful way. The real magic comes when you combine visual design with the right scripts. This is what makes geektool a Visually Productive dream. These steps are tailored for my own process which is currently based on Google Calendar and todo.txt. If you happen to use these tools, this will be very straightforward. Either way, follow this step-by-step guide to create your own VP desktop:
- Download and install the following items to get started:
- Install Geektool into your preferences panel. This is pretty straightforward and the instructions on the Tynsoe.org website do a good job of explaining the install process.
- Download and setup the Desktop Background image that I put together. The image is based on a pattern wallpaper template created by Luke Roberts and released under a Creative Commons license. I too grant the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License to this work.
- Grab a few fonts that will look good on top of the moleskine image. The ones I’m using are EDO and Journal.
- Configure your first geek tool setting — let’s start with the day of the month.
- Open System Preferences
- Under the “Other” category, choose “geektool”
- Create a new entry
- In the drop-down at the top, where it says “file” change that to “shell.”
- In the box that asks for a command, enter:
date +%d
- At the top-left of your screen, you will now see a blue box with the day of the month in it. You can move the box around and resize it as you need.
- Now we’ll change the format of the contents of the box. Back in geektool, choose the option for “Colors and Font.” Change the font to EDO and the size to 64. Position the box on the screen as you wish.
- Update the “refresh” time from 10 seconds to 60 seconds. This will slow down how often the script runs and saves a bit of your CPU.
- You’ve now created the first component on your geektool background. Remember how you just did this, because for the next few items I’m going to breeze by some of these steps.
- Add another entry for the month. Follow the same directions as before, only this time use a font size of 36, EDO font and the following command:
date +%B
- Add an entry for the day of the week. Font-size: 24, EDO font. Command:
date +%A
- These were the easy ones. Next we’ll add a bit more scripting magic and add the calendar for the month. In this command, you’ll need to make sure the quotes are included precisely as below. Here I’m using Andale Mono for my font and a size of 10 points.
cal | sed "s/^/ /;s/$/ /;s/ $(date +%e) / $(date +%e | sed 's/./_/g') /" | tail -7 | head -6
- Download, install and configure gcalcli. This is a python script that gives you a sweet command line interface to your Google Calendar. It works for either your personal Google account or a Google account provisioned through Google Apps, though the instructions are a bit different for the two. The instructions for installation are a bit sparse, but since the process is straightforward this shouldn’t hold you up.
- Once you have gcalcli working for your account, go back into geektool and create a new entry. Setup the font as Journal 14pt and the command as the following:
gcalcli --nc agenda 12am 11:59pm | sed "s/............\(.*\)/\1/" | sed "s/12:00am/Today /" | sed '/^$/d'
- Since there isn’t a gdata interface to Google Tasks (It’s on my wishlist), I use Gina Tripani’s (of Lifehacker fame) excellent todo.txt concept as well as the todo.sh scripts to manage my todo list. If you’re interested in trying out this system, checkout todotxt.com and install her scripts. Combine them with quicksilver and you can easily manage your entire todo list with some quick shortcuts. Let me know in the comments if you’re interested in learning more about this.
- An alternative to todo.txt scripts is to literally just create a txt file somewhere on your computer where you keep a running list of todo items. This and the next step won’t directly work with that system, but by now you’ve probably learned enough about how geektool works to figure out how to display your txt file.
- Once you’ve got todo.txt working, add one last entry to geektool. Once again use the Journal font and be very careful with the command:
todo.sh list | sed "s/-e //" | sed -n '/^[0-9][0-9]*/p' | sed -n '/ x /!p'
- Before you’re finished be sure to copy the commands you used into your notes. I’ve found that geektool still has a few bugs and will occasionally crash out on you. It’s never brought my system down with it, but once it did lose its settings. Just to be safe, back them up so you can recover as easily as possible.
Congratulations, you’ve now got a VP desktop and are well on your way to using technology to beautify your productivity. Let me know in the comments what you think and suggest other things that you’d like to see added to make your desktop even more useful.
