Without a clock in sight ... I'd just spend the entire day on Hacker News and not even realize it.
Turn off the clock on your menu bar
21–30 of 46 posts
Re: Turn off the clock on your menu bar
#22Something that I would add to that is have someone you trust change your Facebook password (for the day, the week, until the weekends, however long). If you're like me, it's not uncommon to log in ~5-10 times a day just for a quick check. Doing so interrupts your flow the same way diverting your attention to an upcoming event does. However, when you get in the habit of not even being able to check it, that distractio…
I do something similar in that I asked my girlfriend to change the password to her Netflix account and not tell me what she changed it to so I cannot use it when I am not with her. When it is time for us to watch an instant video, I put a virtual keyboard on the screen, hand her a wireless mouse and she types in the password while I avert my eyes. (Note that this only helps if I remember to log out of Netflix when we are done for the evening.)
I am aware that many (most?) people are made uncomfortable by restrictions, even ones they chose with an unclouded mind, but I seem to like them if they reduce my need to exert willpower to resist temptation and do not get in the way too much.
Re: Turn off the clock on your menu bar
#23I don't have the clock turned off, but all of the other cognitive distractions were removed long ago, particularly notifications of any sort. Sometimes I forget how distracting that stuff was because it's the first thing I do when I set up any new computer. For me, the clock isn't a distraction, but a popup for any of the million things that can happen on the intertubes is ridiculously distracting.
If I'm in focus mode, I'll also quit Adium, fire up think, and use Vitamin-R to do a pomodoro session. Works well for me, YMMV.
Re: Turn off the clock on your menu bar
#24At an internship two summers ago, I found the last few hours on Fridays took forever, so I started covering the clock the corner of my screen with a post-it note with a smiley face on it. It helped quite a bit. :-)
Re: Turn off the clock on your menu bar
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
System Preferences > (System Row) Time Machine > Uncheck "Show time machine status in Menu Bar"
More to the point, every icon in the menu bar except for Spotlight can be turned on or off in the System Preferences. If hunting down those checkboxes is too much work, you can also Command-click on any of Apple’s icons [0] and drag them out of the menu bar. This also allows you to rearrange icons. (That works also for buttons on toolbars.) Super User has a hacky way of disabling the Spotlight icon: http://superuser.…
I only have one third-party icon in my menu bar (Dropbox) and it can’t be dragged out of the menu bar. I don’t know whether that’s the case for all third-party icons.
It is. Apple has their own private API for their "menu extras" and actually loads them into the windowserver itself. It's a major PITA to support one of these things, so only a very small number of third party apps choose to do it.
The alternative public API is basically just a tiny window for each item sitting in the menubar. There's no technical reason why Apple couldn't implement the same kind of command-drag behaviour, but thus far they haven't.
Re: Turn off the clock on your menu bar
#26I use XMonad as my tiling window manager, and I make judicious use of the "toggle struts" shortcut. When 'docks' set themselves up at the edges of the screen they define 'struts' (which are the areas that they intend to use) so that normal windows can avoid them. Then they are toggled off in XMonad, the tiling manager reclaims that portion of the screen, allowing the currently displayed windows to cover the docks. This allows me to keep docks that are informative, but reclaim that desktop space or just axe the visual clutter with a Super+b ('Super' being the Windows or Apple key under Linux).
Re: Turn off the clock on your menu bar
#27I started heading in this direction a few years ago, and now I'm running dwm ( http://dwm.suckless.org ), no menu bar, with a couple of scripts that I have to manually run to see things like the time or my unread email count. It did take some getting used to, but I'm definitely more productive this way.
Heh. I was just thinking about creating something similar and calling it 'status,' but apparently Ubuntu has gobbled up that very generic command name for upstart.
Re: Turn off the clock on your menu bar
#28Because I have my bar set to auto hide I totally forget about time when I work. Alarm reminders are great to remind you that you should take a break :)
Re: Turn off the clock on your menu bar
#29The top portion is 309 words. The portion after the tl;dr heading is 386 words.
(used cat | wc to do the word count).
Re: Turn off the clock on your menu bar
#30I actually use the clock for something other than time: it tells me when the computer is bogged down/frozen. If the seconds stop updating, it means something else is sucking the resources (usually some loop in the latest build of whatever app I'm working on).
I keep a CPU monitor in my menu bar for that purpose. If the CPU monitor stops updating then I can be confident that I'm really screwed.