Sometimes it feels like the very tools meant to boost your productivity end up detracting from it. With all the notifications, messages, and pings coming in, I often find myself checking incoming alerts more than I do actually getting anything done. If you want your productivity helpers to actually leave you alone for once, you can do a lot worse than to build the QuietDash, a Raspberry Pi-powered eInk display that doesn't pester you.

The QuietDash won't invade your workspace with notifications

It also looks great

The creator of QuietDash, fberrez, wrote a full write-up of their invention on GitHub. The idea behind QuietDash is that it keeps tabs on all the information you'd expect from a DIY dashboard, with one caveat: it refreshes a handful of times an hour. This is not something you'll have your eyes glued to all day. It's designed to give you everything you need to know at a glance so you can get back to work right away.

Here are all the features the QuietDash supports:

• A workday progress ring so you can see how much of the day is left at a glance
• Today's tasks
• Weather
• Calendar
• Time and date
• A news/RSS line

Interestingly, fberrez has some good reasoning behind why they picked an eInk display for the job. I thought it was because it has a low power profile and is designed specifically for low refresh rates, but fberrez makes the excellent point that a backlit screen is a distraction in itself. By using eInk, the QuietDash can blend into the background a lot easier than if fberrez used an LCD screen instead.

While you can build your own via the GitHub page, you can express your interest in a prebuilt version over on the QuietDash website.