Declutter or unclutter your computer desktop using Zorro

Posted on October 11, 2007 at 12:15 pm

With the advent of beautiful widescreen displays on laptops and graphics cards on desktops that can support more than one monitor, it’s pretty easy to have not only your desk cluttered, but your computer desktop screen also! Even while writing this post, I have about 4 to 5 different windows open: one for email, one for writing this post, one for Firefox, and one for Yahoo Messenger.

Now trying to focus your attention on writing a post (or an email, or letter, or college essay, etc) while having 10 things all around is not really very productive! However, closing down your chats, email, videos, etc is also a pain because you’re more than likely to want to view those items soon.

So if you want to remove all distractions temporarily, say for 10 minutes, and then come back to your world of clutter, you can use a nifty little program called Zorro.

Zorro is cool because it acts like the cropping tool you have for pictures: pick an area that you want to keep and cut out the rest. Once you start up Zorro, you pick an area of the screen you want to focus on by dragging the box and pulling the bottom right edge. Once you’ve got your focus area, go ahead and press the Esc key once and everything around that box will be blacked out. Here’s what my screen looks like now:

If you quickly need to access something else on the screen, just press the Esc key again! Go back to no clutter? Press Esc again! It’s a great way to keep all of your distractions within quick reach, but not completely visible. That way you can write that fabulous paragraph for your essay without being disturbed by constantly flashing IM chat windows!

You can also use Zorro for presentations to bring your audience’s attention to a particular part of the screen. Definitely a useful utility in my daily computer life!

Source: Digital Inspiration