A Minimalist Workspace
I recently read an article about creating a minimalist workspace, which got me thinking about how I could take steps to simplify my workspace. When I was not working from home, this wasn’t too difficult. Some of the items were located in different parts of the office (the printer, office supplies, etc.), and I generally avoided bringing things from home besides a picture or two of my wife Natalie and me. I’ve now been working from home for almost 5 months now, and I have to admit that it’s become a bit more difficult.
I do have a few more requirements now that I work from home like a router and backup drive that I need to keep on my desk (so that office equipment doesn’t spread to other parts of the house). However, the main struggle is keeping mail, writing instruments, and an assortment of other junk off and out of my desk. Here’s a little picture of what I mean.
The desk space is mainly taken up by my laptop, monitor, router (behind the laptop), office phone, and Apple Time Capsule (behind the phone). It’s also filled with a collection of pens, markers, and sticky notes. On the floor, I’ve spread out the contents of the drawers, everything from greeting cards to Eclipse glasses to notebooks. You’ll also notice that I have a small printer off to the side of the desk. If you look at the edges of the photo, you’ll see that I have an extra monitor that I’m not using at the moment and a bulky Windows machine.
To implement some of the recommendations from the article, I started by identifying my workspace requirements. Unfortunately, this meant that a lot of things had to stay.
- Laptop
- Monitor
- Router
- Office phone
- Apple time capsule
- Printer
On the other hand, when I didn’t have those items on the desk, it did open up a lot of space. Next I cleaned out my desk drawers, ultimately tossing most of it. I also used a lot of the space in the white drawers to relocate some of the bulkier things like the Windows laptop, which I only rarely use. Here’s what my workspace looks like now.
It feels so much better to have an uncluttered work environment!
I do want to mention a couple habits that I believe are essential to maintaining an environment like this. The first one is something I learned from the article: return items back to their place in the drawer once you’re done using them. Otherwise, your desk will slowly become cluttered again. Another one is that items in a desk drawer should almost never be stacked. The exception is with like items such as multiple notebooks or multiple pads of sticky notes. And lastly, keep paperwork at bay by dealing with it daily and not letting it pile up little by little.
I hope this has inspired you to reexamine your own work environment.