Recently, in my quest to minimize distractions, I’ve been going through and …fixing things. First was updating my procmail and my spam filtering so that the only mail that ends up in my Inbox is real mail. (Inbox Zero for the past month!) And here’s what I did for Adium so I could leave IM on while I was working:

Turning off dock animations (no more bounces) and hiding Adium while in the background (no more window popping) were really huge. I also have my dock hidden, which helps as well. (The menu bar gives me enough cues so that I can see what’s going on, but that isn’t too bothersome while I’m trying to work.)

And of course, I have my work.py script, which lays out my Terminals appropriately. At some point I might start scripting Space switching for that, but at least right now, this seems to be working out OK.