I was reluctant for several hours to
"Clear your dashboard and start over ", becuase I was afraid I wouldn't be able to "find things".
It turned out to be very easy. Nothing ever "goes away", each item just moves to the far-left "holding area".
I cleared everything, then created two rows with only two columns each.
(If I do it again, I might use only ONE row with two columns, and just stack everything I want to see in those two boxes. The downside of two rows is that when one column's contents get scanty, white space appears below that "row" in that column, and items only start populating that column "below" the items in that "row" in the other column. I'm pretty sure I said that incomprehensibly.)
Then I dragged the things whose names I recognized and wanted over to those two boxes.
I wanted my thread watcher near the top, under "Notifications". Then Watched Forums. Then anything that changes often. (Except pictures - when I want to gaze at photos, I go hunting, instead of loading gigs of photos every time I come back to my Home Page.
Then I hunted around for some things whose names I didn't recognize. I would pull some likely candidates into a recognizable area (like "right column, bottom"). Then I looked at them as a desktop, so I knew what each name meant. Then I "dragged left" the ones I didn't want.
Later, in forum posts, people would mention things that sounded like I might want them, so I went hunting for those and added a few.
I think I'll start "archiving" screenshots of desktop layouts, just to remind myself of things I might want again some some day.
