Home Base - The Evolution of my Work from Home Desk

These last few weeks have felt like a return to the days of the great lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 for me, what with me being stuck at home and only heading out for essential stuff like grocery shopping or medical appointments. Unlike with COVID-19, there’s an endgame in sight for my personal lockdown 3.11. It was while sitting around here that I came across an old article idea in one of my OneNote notebooks, one that I must have jotted down in the waning days of the final lockdown given its subject matter. But hey, since all other article ideas have dried up for the moment, why not give it a shot?

So, when the hammer came down on Ireland on Friday, March 13th, 2020, a lot of people were left scrambling to convert kitchen tables and other available surfaces to makeshift work desks. Like in so many other countries, work culture in Ireland had traditionally orbited around the company office, and many people had never countenanced working from home. So, whilst some people settled down on their couches to work from there, others took over the aforementioned kitchen table or frantically tried to order desks from online retailers who themselves were often unsure whether they’d be able to keep up production, let alone deliveries. 

From my first apartment, which I don't remember being as dirty as it apparently was...

...via my first flat here in Cork...

...to my current flat, my trusty IKEA desk has been one constant companion for me.

I found myself in a lucky position. Ever since moving into my first flat back in Germany, I’d insisted on having a dedicated desk for my computer. It started out as a home for my gaming computer but became ever more important as I moved over to first blogging and later content creation in general. In fact, one of my oldest pieces of furniture is the actual desk I got for that very first apartment, one that has survived several moves at this point and is almost 20 years old. Not bad for a cheap IKEA MDF desk, eh? I’d already worked from home a few times before, both due to logistical reasons during my employer’s office move and because of illness, having come down with what I now believe to be COVID-19 in the last days of 2019 and first two weeks of 2020. So, I wasn’t completely unprepared.

How it started - Wires abound in March 2020. But hey, lockdown will only be for a couple of weeks, right? Right...?

Having said that, it wasn’t all plain sailing. I was, and still am for that matter, a dyed-in-the-wool Apple user when it comes to my private computing needs, and my desk setup was designed around that, as well as my misadventures in content generation, with USB hubs, card readers and early generation Magic Keyboard and Mouse/Trackpad from Apple being the dominant components. With a company that for some reason insists on using Windows, some changes had to be made and the first few months of the first lockdown, my desk looked like a nest of snakes, with cables everywhere. Up until the summer of 2020, I was also only able to use one screen, since the laptop stand I used, a Twelve South Book Arc mod, kept any laptop closed whilst it was in the stand. This made the regular presentations I have to run in my job into quite a chore, especially the big ones involving upper management.

Summer 2020 - Built-in laptop screens are useable again thanks to a "new" laptop stand and Amazon has successfully invaded my desk, however wires still rule for my work setup, the wireless keyboard and mouse seen here only working with my MacBook.

It was in the summer of 2020, between my first business trip to Germany and the Great Comet Hunt of that year, that the first major change of my desk setup. Replacing the Book Arc with another Twelve South product, the Ghost Stand. This finally allowed me to use my laptop screen as a second monitor at work, a godsend when you’re working with multiple large Excel files, presentations, or CRM tools like Salesforce. I was still juggling a wired keyboard, mouse and headset for my work setup and a wireless setup for my private use though, something that was becoming increasingly annoying! However, for the time being, I had bigger fish to fry.

As Autumn 2020 rolled around, the age of wires on my desk had started to wane, thanks to a new multi-device wireless keyboard an mouse, courtesy of my employer. It's also one of the few times my work machine, a Lenovo ThinkPad, is caught on camera.

It was my employer who became the impetus for the next major change. Realizing that working from home was likely going to be the norm for a considerable amount of time, they started reimbursing even normally office-based staff like yours truly for home office equipment. I was sorted for most stuff already and now, the time had finally come to banish the last few cables from my desk. By November 2020, I’d replaced the cable juggling with a wireless multi-device keyboard and mouse from Logitech. This ended up making a huge difference to my workflow, apart from making my desk a whole lot less cluttered in general. One of my great worries had always been spilling coffee over my work laptop, and the new setup effectively eliminated that worry. Another major change in the summer of 2020 was the addition of an Amazon Echo Show 5 smart speaker to my desk. I’d had this speaker since the previous year, using it as an oversized alarm clock in my bedroom but brought it over to the office on the grounds that the speaker’s integrated display would be more useful there, an assessment which turned out to be correct. Throughout my whole work from home period, Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa has been providing me with news updates, information on my schedule, and direct voice control over my smart home.

This is the setup that saw me through most of 2020 and indeed 2021.

It was this set up, external screen, wireless peripherals, and an Amazon smart speaker, that got me through most of 2021, with the biggest change being a change of position of the laptop stand to the other side of the desk. During the same year, the old USB hub was also banished from my desk, having become almost useless in my increasingly USB-C based setup. There was however, one final change left to come. As 2021 began to draw to a close, it became time to use the 2021 edition of my company’s office reimbursement benefit and for me, that meant time to eliminate the latest bit of wired equipment on my desk: My headset. In retrospect, I could have probably used my speakers and the laptop’s built-in mic since I live alone, but something just didn’t sit right with me in that regard. Similarly, I didn’t feel comfortable with having my laptop blurt out every company conversation I had during the hot summer months, when I was invariably working with an open window. So, a wireless Logitech headset it was, and my trusty wired Jabra headset went into that black hole that is my equipment cabinet. Alongside the headset arrived the last permanent addition to my desktop setup, an IKEA desk lamp to add that little bit of extra lighting during the dark months of autumn and winter.

By the end of 2021, my USB hub, the last vestige of wires on my desk, had finally been retired, with a desk lamp with wireless charging pad as well as a wireless headset completing my new wireless setup.

It was this final setup that helped me see out the last few months of lockdowns and working from home here in Ireland, and it is this final setup that I’m currently using whilst working from home during my convalescence. Will there be changes in the future? Quite likely. My screen, whilst still working perfectly fine, is beginning to get on in years somewhat and will have to be replaced sometime. The Twelve South Ghost Stand is also beginning to show its age, I’d gotten it for my mom’s MacBook Pro all the way back in 2014, so that will sooner or later have to be replaced as well. I’m also considering getting a decent webcam as I’m currently left to use the integrated ones on my work laptop and private MacBook, neither of which are particularly great. However, all those changes are cosmetic, and the general arrangement of my desk is unlikely to change anytime soon. I mean, it’s worked since 2020, so why change it now?