Top 10 ways to instantly DEcrease productivity on your Mac
#5 Disable right clicking, slow things down
Open the Keyboard and Mouse System prefs, and set all mouse buttons to “Primary”. Also, while you’re in there, disable your mouse’s scroll wheel, and set all the tracking/scrolling speeds to their slowest, same goes for the trackpad on laptops. Disable two finger scrolling and two-finger secondary click. After all, we’re not in a hurry, remember?
#6 Remove the list of alternate views from your Finder windows
This is more of a safety measure than anything, a way to ensure you won’t be tempted to quickly switch to a different view if you need to quickly find the number for poison control or something.
Above: The default toolbar (top) is too productive). We can fix that (bottom).
To do this, hold down your command key while clicking just to the right the “view list”. Drag up and release, and you will see a little puff of smoke as you get rid of that annoying “productivity increasing” set of icons. While you’re at it, get rid of the Actions, QuickLook, and the front and back arrows. A Sparse toolbar is a happy toolbar!
#7 Disable Tabbed browsing in Safari and Firefox
This one might hurt most of all, depending on how much web browsing you do. It’s funny how a little thing like tabbed browsing, which didn’t exist a few years ago, can now seem like an almost necessity these days. But get rid of it. The goal here is to be able to enjoy spending quality time using your computer, and tabbed browsing
#8 Set a screensaver as your desktop wallpaper
This is one of those cool things you can do in OS X that serves no purpose other than making your Windows-using friends go “Ohhh!”, but it is a great way to slow down your system. All it takes is a quick little terminal command. Just open Terminal and enter:
/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/
ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background
(with no line breaks)
And hit
Wow. Now you have an incredibly distracting and CPU-eating desktop that is sure to slow down even the most powerful Mac. If it doesn’t, find yourself a more CPU-intesive screensaver. If you want to undo what you’ve done, head on over to Apple Gazette.
#9 Remove everything from your dock, and make it huge
Fast access to apps is the enemy, and besides, the Finder and Trash are all anyone really needs anyway. For extra credit, place the dock on the left of your screen, and Use Tinker Tool to set it’s origin at “start”
#10 Spend a couple hours viewing Mac Eye Candy
This final tip is self serving, but we think you’ll agree it is an excellent way to decrease your productivity. Head on over to our Mac chick of the Month archive, and check out our vast archive of Mac Chick pictorials. The only downside to this tip is it may not be safe for all work environments, and the whole point of this was to slow down your productivity, not cut into your valuable personal time. Still, you’ve earned it. Slowing down a Mac is hard work!
Forgot the number one way to slow down a Mac, run Windows on it…
T
The number one way to decrease productivity? Google Reader!
The sad thing is you know somewhere there’s a guy who actually IS using Terminal to do everything.
Where’d you get the hot chick in santa’s helper suit? I think the “busy photo” tip is definitely the best. Now where to find this busy photo…
I certainly fall into number 10 category. However, I often wait for my screen saver to really enjoy the eye candy.
Let’s not forget this:
http://www.thecleverest.com/rosetta.jpg
Absolute, best way to decrease your productivity on a Mac:
don’t uninstall the trial version of Office when you install Office!
How about splitting up blog posts into multiple pages so you have to click to the next page on relatively short articles? To waste even more time, do this on long articles.
I actually do use the terminal for everything. It’s why I love my mac, it being unix based and all. 😀
Are you my Dad? Because he’s been doing at least 7 of these since Mac Os 9.
Oh crap… I do two of those… (6 & 8)
I can explain though! I use the keyboard shortcuts for the different views… So I remove the buttons to leave space to add buttons for burning, appzapper, time machine &c.
On the screensaver… it’s an rss ticker (like on news shows) of all the blogs I read & a bunch of other things. Not really productivity enhancing, but it does stop me having to go to netnewswire all the time
Scott, that’s a shot from our Mac Chick of the Month December 2007, the lovely Morgan Kennedy.
https://macenstein.com/archives/967
-The Doc
HA! i see someone doesn’t work on their mac.
I actually use “open folders in new windows”
BUT i have my default set to paned view
, so i can navigate quickly, then double click a folder to get a new window for dragging items around.- a HUGE time save as opposed to springloaded folders or even stacks of folders in the dock.
i also sort by size(when in list view), But change the default button set on my windows to be the back, the path, views button, & the delete.
And i Actually keep spotlight OFF, the auto-index of every connected hard drive and lack of searching inside the system and app bundles make it fairly worthless as a search too for me. The ONLY time i NEED a search tool is in a search for a random system item thats nestled deep in core services, i keep everything else in it place.
I connect many different drives and other computers to mine , the performance hit when i connect a TB of firewire drives that have never been connected before(and Spotlight goes to town trying to index it)affects my workflow as well.
Rant ON* I still dont understand the need for such robust search tools on the desktop. i keep my Documents organized in folders. My email gets sorted by rules, i Finally bent and let itunes organize my music, and iPhoto handles my photos (albums by subject, a list by size, and a list by date).
Wny do i need anything more than a “Find file” with a little flexibility.(and with time machine , i’m not seeing the need for that, if i can remember where i saw it at any given time , i can find it)
My last major complaint about spotlight is the litter it leaves behind on NON-mac hard drives, i connect to my linux share , spotlight leaves junk there, to my windos shared files , whaddya know , junk there. *RANT off
Yes, Spotlight Bad. i said it, noone else ever will.