I spend about 12 hours every day in my home office, a small 10x8ft extension at the rear of the house. Until relatively recently I’d grown very uncritical about the way it looked and the manner in which the desk was set up. However, I’d been growing increasingly aware that my desk was causing me some angst (one of those old-school office jobs with a curve on one half of the front edge). At the same time, my chair needed some work to it, as one of the arm pads had split (it was never the most comfortable in any event).
Anyway, over recent weeks I’ve been obsessing about how I can make the room feel more warm/cosy/possibly moody and particularly how I can address the issues above but also set up the desk in the most productive way (accounting for the fact that I can often find myself in there at night). That includes both kit and layout, and following a fair amount of research I’ve now defined and started to implement my plan. Much of what I’m doing in terms of changes involves some elements of kit that are generally regarded as the best available right now, so I thought I’d start a thread documenting the various current and planned changes – and the ongoing progress – in case it’s firstly of interest, and secondly helpful to other TZers.
Okay, so this is what it looked like to begin with – unfortunately I didn’t include the curved front edge in this shot, but it shows a fairly basic, albeit neat, layout.
Nothing very inspiring, though, and overall pretty… bland. My current kit less so, though - it’s built around a blindingly fast Apple MacBook Pro M1 Max which I knowingly over specified when I bought it not that long ago:10-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 16-core neural engine, 64GB unified memory and 2TB SSD storage. Supporting that beast is a 27” Apple Thunderbolt Display – again, a fantastic bit of kit. There are no plans whatsoever to change either any time soon, I should add, albeit that monitor temptation is strong.
The reno of the room itself is essentially a few repairs and a paint job on e walls, although it’s fair to say that the finish is going to be relatively radical. Normally I’d do that first, but given that I’m still in recovery from my recent surgery that can’t happen. Accordingly, I’m hoping that it will be done two weekends from now, three at the most (I’ve enlisted my son and one of his friends to help with any lifting, etc). I’ve not been idle, though, and have started implementing the desk set-up changes that I have in mind. This is what I’ve done so far, with various other updates to follow over the next week or two.
Desk
I did think long and hard about splurging on a quality sit/stand frame with a solid wooden top, but cost-wise it was looking frightening, and in reality I didn’t see myself standing whilst working once the novelty of dong so had worn off. Accordingly, I decided to re-use the legs on the existing desk and just get a plain rectangular replacement as cost=effectively as possible. I knew I want black, and my sone and I worked for a fair bit longer than anticipated yesterday to make it happen. (I actually overdid it, and ended up in bed from early evening with a sore tummy.)
(There's a little nod to TZ in that photo - I wonder if anyone can tell me what it is...)
Chair
Now, I did splurge a bit on the chair, but given the extent that I sit on it I reckon it was justifiable. Anyway, I went for a fully adjustable Herman Miller Aeron Remastered, which new are about £1200. However, they can be picked up for about 35-40% of that refurbished without too much trouble and sometimes a little less that that with more patience and effort. I’ve never experienced a work chair even approaching the heavenly comfort afforded by the Aeron, and although it was expensive I have no buyer’s remorse whatsoever. I LOVE it.
With more to follow imminently, there are also a couple of new items on my desk that are currently considered best in class, so I thought fellow TZers might be interested to see them and, perhaps consider whether they would make useful upgrades themselves.
Dock
I needed to upgrade my connectivity options, so bought the outstanding Caldigit TS4 Thunderbolt dock. The TS4 is currently considered the best dock available right now – there are many, many reviews on the net testifying to that – so the decision to overspend a little on it was a relatively easy one.
It provides an insane 18 ports (12 on the back and 6 on the front) as well as charging my MBP at 97w through a direct Thunderbolt connection. This is brilliant, as if I need to become mobile with my laptop, I just unplug that one lead and off I go (I already have the Apple Magsafe charger and another pre-connected wireless mouse in my travel bag).
Mouse
Once again, my new mouse – a Logitech MX Master 3S for Mac – is deemed to be arguably the best mouse available at the moment. It’s a very ergonomic design, has some fantastic basic functionality as well as being very customisable. For me, though, it will also play nicely with something else that I have coming down the line, so when I found it with a bit of a reduction as Amazon I leapt into action in classic LTF style. To be honest, I could probably have got away with not buying t, but… well, I did.
Well, that’s it for now, although there will be some further updates as and when other changes take place and it’ll culminate with the big change in respect of décor which I mentioned earlier. I do hope it’s of interest to some, because all the little details have been keeping me awake at night for weeks now (well, that and one or two unassociated issues!!!).
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