So aside from trying to make my laptop as good for work as I can, I’m starting to consider the importance of having a good “office” at home. I’ve been spending almost all of my time at school this semester because I find it easier to get sidetracked at home. I should want to be at home, though, so I’m thinking about what I can do at home to make it somewhere I want to be.
The first picture is where I was working a couple of weeks ago at my dad’s place. Note the cardboard box being used as a desk. My dad’s working on completely remaking the bedrooms at his place, so the house is pretty messy. I also don’t have a room to myself, or a proper desk, or a good office chair, or any of the luxuries that makes for a good office. Things will improve when my room is done and I get settled in there, but I still won’t have a nice desk or a comfortable chair. He’ll probably buy those, or split the cost with me, but we’ll see when the time comes. Maybe I’m getting a desk for Christmas.
The second picture is me checking out how I’d like to have a second monitor. A second monitor would be a great motivator to work at home, because I can’t have that at school. I can do an assignment on one monitor while keeping the assigned questions open on the other monitor, stuff like that. I’ll shop around after Christmas, I think, and see if I can snag a nice monitor or two for a hundred bucks. Well… Maybe not. Two hundred bucks is a lot of money for a little bonus like that. Desks and chairs come first, monitors after.
The third picture is the desk I’m using at my mom’s. I just cleaned it up today, so it looks nothing like that picture, but this is the first time it’s been clean since we moved in. So that’s what I had been working with for the past few months. Something you can’t see in the picture is that the desk is almost as long as my room is wide. The door just clears it on the right when I come in, and the left side is partially covered by my bed, blocking access to my power outlet. The desk is far too big and we’ve never really had a use for it, because it’s just bad for a desktop computer and mediocre for everything else. So we’ll probably sell that and invest in a nicer, smaller desk. I have a nice chair, though.
Ideally, I’ll have a good place to work at my mom’s and my dad’s. Somewhere I actually want to be, where I can buckle down and study. Bare minimum requirements would be:
- a comfortable office chair
- a desk that’s big enough to hold the essentials but not so big that it gets cluttered
- quick access to good power outlets - my dad’s house needs a bit of electrical work, my mom’s house needs easier access
Having a nice chair and desk would be enough to make it worth staying home, and anything above that would just be a bonus. Off the top of my head, some things that would be convenient:
- a second monitor would be kinda cool
- good shelving/storage space to keep my textbooks and assorted things
- a secondary keyboard so I don’t have to be so close to my laptop screen
- better cord management
Of course, all of these things cost money, and they may not really be worth the cost. I’ll cover the basics first and then see if anything pops up for a good price. Tomorrow night I’ll post on my continuing efforts to modify my laptop. I’ve already posted about the software I’m using (OneNote is beautiful for school, Q10 is great for writing, etc.) but now I’ve moved on to aesthetic changes: organization, application launchers, and the like. And I’ll include the files so you can try it out yourself! Yay!