Removing Dropbox, Wifi, Spotlight + Notification Center From Your Menu Bar
My mind often follows what I see. I’m a visual-spatial thinker.
So I wanted to get rid of as much of the stuff in my Mac’s menu bar as possible so I can focus on what I’m writing right now. This may be the nerdiest post I’ve ever written, but it’s part of my new commitment to myself to return my expression to my own blog first (thanks for the inspiration Scott Rosenberg) before social media or elsewhere, and to write more often.
I’m looking to be more grounded. My goal is not to be a productivity machine. I want to enjoy quality with my work and with people. That comes from listening first to what’s in me, not to reacting to what I see out there. I now realize that this is a very useful shift when dealing with massive change and a rapidly challenged quality of connection and conversation in my life and my life online. So that’s why I’m posting. This is just the next useful thing I found and instead of tweeting this out I wrote a post. 1998, here I come.
This app called Broomstick made by a 16 year old in New Zealand removes a lot of menu icons, including the one from Dropbox.
It also gave me the tip that I could get rid of the wifi symbol by pressing command and dragging it off. This works for many menu bar icons.
I use Spotlight a lot. But I just use a couple of keyboard buttons to call it up (set them in the System Preferences) I don’t need to see the magnifying glass in the menu bar to do that. Here’s how I got rid of it, and how I got rid of the even more annoying Notification Center icon thingy in the far right corner of the menu.
I had to use an app called Terminal to do this. I do not code. But why let that stop me? I can cut and paste with the best of them and that’s all you have to do here. I’m just thinking about what I’m writing and who I’m writing to and you know what? It feels relaxing.
