Efficiency Ninja: Make The Dock Work For You

Organizing the dock in Mac OS X is tricky, specifically because it’s hard to know what to put there. The folks I know keep the apps they most frequently use in the dock, which is what it was designed for. The problem is that some of us (myself included) have a skewed idea of what we frequently use. It’s only taken me four major revisions of OS X to organize my dock in a way that makes sense to me while remaining efficient. Here’s how I did it.

Step 1: Sign up for a Wakoopa account and install Wakoopa Tracker. Sure, it’s another social network, but we’re going to be using it for its time-tracking abilities. If you want to know what you’re using the most, Wakoopa can tell you.

Step 2: Run Wakoopa Tracker for at least a month. One full month of average use should be enough to provide you with a clear picture of which applications are getting the most love.

Step 3: Return to Wakoopa. From your profile page, click the Usage link under your profile name.

This will give you a list of all of the applications you’ve used in the last month sorted by duration of use. Below is a screenshot of my list.

Step 4: Organize your dock. As you can see, my ten most-used apps are Firefox, Textmate, Adium, Safari, the Finder, NetNewsWire, iTunes, Photoshop, Terminal, and Omnifocus. These are now the items I keep in my dock.

I have over 100 other programs in my Applications folder, though, so how do I launch one of these less-popular apps quickly? My answer to that is Quicksilver. If you’re serious about being productive on your Mac, you need to give Quicksilver a shot. As an application launcher alone, it can change the way you use your machine. The fact that it does so much more than launch apps is icing on the cake. It can be intimidating to learn, though, which is why many tutorials have been written (and filmed!) about it. If you don’t like Quicksilver or find it too powerful, there are other application launchers out there that might fit your needs.

Step 5: Keeping your dock up-to-date. Be sure to re-visit Wakoopa every once in a while to see which apps are dominating your top-10 list, and make adjustments to your dock accordingly.

Bonus points to you if you combine this with Ethan Schnoonover’s Kinkless Desktop. His Hazel-based hack is genius.