Systematic way to an effective desktop...

I regularly invest significant effort to improve my personal effectiveness, keep re-reading GTD (originally explained here), evaluate the tools I'm using et cetera. Within this ongoing quest I found a gorgious article on systematically uncluttering your desktop. Although Ethan shows it on a mac, the fundamental ideas are easily portable:

* clean up, no mercy
* fight desktop entropy
* fine-tune capture and access to your digital assets
* cruelty can be kind (throw away, YAGNI)

Even before following his advice, I had a pretty clean desktop, compared to others. But now I keep only four folders on the desktop: my inbox, an action-folder, a smart folder containing everything I touched during the last 48 hours plus a link to my personal archive.

Here's a screenshot of Ethans version: