More Productivity Tips

Thinking about productivity lately, following are a few more tips relating to the minimizing the distractions and interruptions in our desktop environments (which I'm convinced is one of the big killers of productivity these days):

• If you're a MacOS X user, turn on Dock auto-hiding. There are just far too many distracting icons there informing you of 10 new emails, 15 new RSS article, Marco trying to reach you in chat, etc.
• Use something like ImOnTime to remind you to check email three times a day, and then don't check it more often than that.
• Quit any instant messaging software you don't need during the working day. People just seem to ignore "I'm busy." status. I'm working on a cron-driven shell script that will start iChat and Adium at around 6:00 in the afternoon, and shut them down around midnight. (I'll leave IRC running, because we use that intensively for work.)

Other ideas?...