That notification badge sitting in your corner is an open loop draining your working memory.
For years, I treated my workstation like a command center. Slack lived in the bottom right, half a dozen browser tabs crowded the left, and my terminal sat in the middle. I felt like an air traffic controller. Then I tracked my actual output and realized I spent half my day just re-orienting myself after every visual ping.
Meditation apps didn't fix it. Writing rigid rules for my tiling window manager did. The machine started enforcing boundaries my discipline couldn't.
We optimize query execution times and CI/CD pipelines all day long. Yet we leave our primary interface in a chaotic default state. Every notification pop-up demands a micro-decision from your prefrontal cortex. Multiply that by a hundred daily events, and you've engineered your own burnout.
I finally stripped the noise out of my window manager config. When I hit my focus shortcut, deterministic rules take over. Chat apps get shoved to a secondary workspace without their unread badges. Browser windows ditch their borders and maximize to kill peripheral chrome. Floating windows are banned.
Here is what that looks like in practice using a standard rules block:
windowrulev2 = workspace 2 silent, class:^(Slack|Discord)$
windowrulev2 = tile, class:^(Slack|Discord)$
windowrulev2 = noborder, focus:1
Hit that hotkey and visual clutter vanishes instantly. You get the editor, the terminal, and the bug. My peripheral vision no longer catches rogue animation frames from background browser tabs.
Productivity usually comes down to removing environmental friction rather than adding habits. When your desktop refuses to show you distractions, you stop hunting for them.
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