I was reading Matt Cutts post the other day titled My 8.7M Pixel Display, and it hit me.
There is no site devoted to showing the various desktop rigs for those of us who earn our livings in the SE/SEO-SEM/Link Building/Online Publicity field (seorigs.com is available, btw). I’ve found a couple other people like Matt and Danny Sullivan who’ve posted pictures and descriptions of their desktop setups, monitor’s etc., and having been asked many times over the years how I manage my daily workflow, I decided to explain it in pictures.
How I Work – Full View
This first shot shows the full command center (click it to enlarge). Bookend laptops, an HP on the left and a Dell Mini 9 on the right. Under the desk is a Dell Studio XPS. Four monitors (15 inch on the left lap, then to the right a 24 inch, a 22 inch, and a 9 inch). Note there are no wireless keyboards or mice. They were always more trouble than they were worth, plus having wired mice and keyboards makes it easier to hurl them greater distances when I have one of my moments (tip: If you use the cord like a lasso and the wind is blowing, you can sail a keyboard over 50 yards.
The Mini Me
That tiny laptop in the above picture (larger picture to the right) is a Dell Mini 9, and that’s the one thing I take with me when I leave the office. Very handy. Mini Me’s sole mission during the day is to run TweetDeck, which is what you see in the smaller photo. When I take it in the house after work, I use it like a Kindle. My first cell phone was about the same size. Seriously, I had that phone. In fact, note to Dell: please make the Mini a phone for us old school types.
ADD Cental
Just above the Mini is a 22 inch monitor, pictured closer at right, and this is what I call “Feed Central” aka ADD Central. It’s blurry becasue that’s what it looks like to me most of the time. Feed Central is my iGoogle homepage, and it currently has 57 feeds from folks I keep up with. I use this to scan all the news my brain can tolerate during the day, the amount of which varies depending on my Mtn. Dew blood level. On the positive side, this overload approach will help me know before anyone when my brain is turning to mush, because one day I’ll look up at that monitor and ask who this Matt Cutts guy is?
Side Note: I use Firefox’s find feature for the feed Central page to highlight the word “link“ so that any time link appears in any post’s title, I see a visual cue. That way I can scan and spot any post from any of the 57 sources that might be more pertinent to my work.
You can’t see it very well, but the first three feeds across the top are Matt’s, SEL, and WebProNews. I set all 57 sources to show the maximum 9 posts, so that’s 513 posts live on that monitor at any given moment. Thank goodness for OCD, ADD, and Red Bull, or someday I’ll be giving interviews like this nice chap to the right, mumbling “linking quid pro quo is spam, Clarice…“
The Main Workhorses
The HP Laptop and the 24 inch Dell monitor on the left are where the real link building takes place. I run Firefox, IE, Thunderbird, assorted tabs and tools, plus a remote session to my link analysis script box located at…Ha! Like I’d give that secret out. If I’m in a phone consult, I’ll have skype, a web cam, glance screen sharing, and often trillian running at the same time. I usually have about ten windows open via tabs when I’m in heavy duty link dev mode. My Firefox is tricked out with about 25 add-ons. If you look closer, you can see that I keep a sidebar open on the left, and my tab bar open on the right. I do a lot of dragging and dropping, and even though there are countless link building tools, apps, and thingamabobs, it’s often the simplest approach that works best. It’s sad that I would call what I just described in this post simple, isn’t it?
Multitasking Without Distraction
It’s worth noting that when I go deep into link building mode for a client, I go invisible to outside communiques except as they relate to that specific project. I also turn off the Feed Central monitor and TweetDeck. Too distracting. There are some days where all I do all day long is I.D. targets and send email or make phone calls. Pure link seeking. I try not to do this too many days in a row, because it can get tedious, but…it’s been proven to me through the years that you can’t work at link building for just an hour or two a day. It takes long stretches of intense focus. I devote at least 4 consecutive hours or more of each day to client link building work. Back in the day, when I was starting out and the web was exploding, my wife and I worked side by side, often for 12 hours straight. This was before we had kids and mortgages.
The rest of my day is spent publishing URLwire, doing outreach and rep mgt., research and running link analysis scripts. Over the weekend I usually have 5-10 link audit scripts running, so on Monday there’s always a pile of linking data for me to distill into reports.
That about covers it.
Why?
Part of the reason I’ve posted this is that many folks in the industry refer to me as “old school”, and while I take it as a compliment, others regard that term with disdain, thinking my approach to link building is something like this. Hardly. As you can see above, my control center is not for the faint of heart or for those who can’t multitask with abandon. Total the info points across my desktop, be they tweets or IMs, add in six email inboxes, and I figure I’m handling and scanning through roughly 3,000 items every day.
If that’s old school, so be it.
What has remained old school is my ethos and outreach communication style and technique. And guess what? They work even better today than they did then.
Desktop Rig Links
If you have a page where you’ve shown and/or described your desktop setup, send me your link, and I’ll post it here, hopefully creating an ever growing log of how we all actually do our thing all day.
Eric Ward (your on it)
Matt Cutts
Danny Sullivan
Craig Burgess of Digital Tsunami
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