I’ve read about 30 books about Time Management and Productivity over the last few years and there are a couple of things all the techniques in these books have in common. One of them is: Do one thing at a time. This is one of the main reasons why I stay disconnected most the time, and it is also the basic idea behind this post.
This post is about all the little applications and programs you can install on your notebooks and desktops as companion to various online services and websites. Although they come with a lot promises and large feature lists, I have a pretty strict opinion regarding all these little tools: If you can do it on the web, don’t use software.
Not only do they slow down your PC, they also distract you constantly from the one really important thing you should be doing right now. Using your browser to access those services gives you a lot of advantages, that may not be that obvious. Here are my top three reasons not to use desktop counterparts for web services:
- You are in control of your time and you avoid distractions. The reason for this is pretty simple: If you need to access a website, it is totally up to you not to do so. So there is no chance for any of these services to make that decision for you. This means, you don’t get interrupted (or maybe even disturbed) by all these “tiny little helpers” hiding in your system tray (that is the area right next to your clock in the lower right corner on your desktop).
- You focus on one thing at a time. As you probably use one browser window in fullscreen mode to access different websites and services, you are automatically focused on one tool at a time. This makes your work much more efficient and effective.
- You don’t waste time for installing, configuring and maintaining an application that doesn’t work offline anyway, so why not accessing the native website instead? Just put a bookmark on your browser for fast access and enjoy the web.
This doesn’t mean that desktop versions of popular web services are inherently a bad thing. They’re not. But if you use them, you should consider the basic idea this post is based on: Do one thing at a time.
The following list contains the most important applications I use on my desktop although there are web-based counterparts: Windows Live Messenger (because there is no support for advanced features like File Sharing or Video Conferencing in web-based clients like Meebo), Skype (because there is no real web equivalent), EverNote and MindManager (because I need to be able to offline access my stuff and because of the great integration with other applications). 
