Focus Your Attention On the Current Task, Hide All Distractions

Distractions are always present when using a computer.

For instance, you are watching a YouTube video but hate the desktop screensaver that gets activated every few minutes. Or you are writing an important Excel sheet and suddenly there's a notification in the system tray that says "Your friend Rick is Online" or that "You a new email."

Here's a real scenario - I am writing this blog post in Windows Live Writer and there's Outlook, Google Talk, Firefox in the background all competing for attention.

All these little things make it tough to focus on the task at hand. If you also find yourself in a similar situation and wish you could work on the computer sans distractions, a little utility called Zorro for Windows can help you here.

Zorro is like placing a cardboard on the screen with a rectangular hole - you focus the Zorro views screen over any area of the desktop (or any running software application), hit the ESC key and Zorro will blank all the outside portion. Distractions, if any, won't be visible unless you escape the Zorro mode (i.e., remove the cardboard).

Get Zorro 1.4 for Windows and stop paying attention to stuff that's not important at that point of time. And similar to Mouse Spotlight, Zorro can be a great help when giving presentations and you want the audience to concentrate on a particular area of the slide or screen. Thanks Martin.

Related: Write Without Distractions