Zach Beauvais

Organising the Workspace

Written by Zach Beauvais

Jun 29, 2008

Having been inspired by Lifehacker’s workspace show and tell, I’ve decided to organise my workspace a bit.

I have a quite deep, wooden desk with drawers which tend to fill with clutter. I’ve decided to feed a power strip through the back of one of the drawers so I can plug in two USB hubs and my MacBook power cable there, out of the way. I’ve also managed to organise a system for filing my papers (I hate paper, it should always be on screen and searchable!) loosely based on the GTD (Getting Things Done) meme.

One thing I’ve done is to mount a power strip to the back of the desk, so I lose some of the trailing cables. It still amazes me, though, how many wires a single office space can generate! There’s still a cluttered feeling to the desk, and there’s nothing on it aside from computing paraphernalia.

I’m planning to put some shelves behind the monitor—the desk is very deep—on which to place external hard-drive and other necessities. I’d like to hide the cables behind it somehow, so they aren’t trailing in any way. I’ve bundled all the cabling with wire ties, and fed most leads through the monitor back, creating a funnel. The overall appearance, though, is still a bit too ad-hoc or rustic or… I don’t know.

What do you think? What would you do with this desk space?

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