October 18, 2020 Opinion, Personal, RandomThoughts
First things first, this is not a “how-to” post explaining you the “one right way” of setting up your home office. I am a Software Engineer (you are likely to be one as well) and like yours, my home office setup is probably somewhere in between coding on sofa and science-fiction command center. In this post I’m just sharing what I’ve done to improve my home office situation and what I’m thinking might be worth to improve it even further. I will be glad to hear any feedback or advice you might have on this.
Location
Reducing noises, keeping kids from fighting for your immediate and undivided attention, avoiding kitchen temptations, dog barking or whatever else is applicable to you, might be one of the most important factors for your home office, yet it might be the one you have the least control of. I do not pretend to have a batcave for work from home either. In fact, I started working on sofa when COVID first hit in March and then quickly realized this wasn’t a good idea. Step by step I improved my WFH situation and currently have something reminiscent of an office. I’m renting a relatively large apartment, though it obviously wasn’t designed with a workspace in mind, so I’m using a bedroom. Yeah, a bedroom! I have rearranged the furniture in a way logically separating the room into office and non-office halves. In this post, I am going to show pictures of my office half. (Not too eager to post photos of my bed, especially when it is not made up :)).
Desk and equipment arrangement
I’m in favor of simplicity and minimalism when it comes to my desk. Even when I was going to the office I would usually keep it empty from anything non-essential. So here is my arrangement:
On the left you see my work laptop with two cables. First cable goes to a docking station serving as a power source and connecting the laptop to 300 Mbps internet (seems to be enough ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) as well as to external camera which you can see on the top of the laptop (I will touch on this again later on). Docking station has enough ports to add more peripherals. Second cable connects my work laptop to KVM. If you see, there is a small button in front of the keyboard – that’s KVM switch allowing me to share 34″ monitor and keyboard between laptops on the left and right. Laptop on the right is my personal laptop. I intentionally don’t login with my personal account on my work laptop for multiple reasons (will touch on this later as well). There is also a desk lamp and desk power source located in the right corner mostly for charging devices (2 USB-C, mini-USB, Garmin). I might keep few different sets of headphones on the desk, but usually prefer to keep them in the back of my “office”.
List of Equipment and details
Except of work laptop and few small things, all equipment is something I bought with my own money before I knew my new employer is so generous to give 1000$ to its employees to improve WFH situation [public info]. Below is the list of the equipment I’m using with links to Amazon for reference only – those are not referral links (I’m not trying to make money on your clicks, and this post is not written for that purpose).
Monitor: Dell UltraSharp U3415W 34-Inch Curved LED-Lit Monitor (Older Model) It is a nice wide curved 34″ monitor I can easily use as if I had two with tools like Spectacle on mac or built-in shortcuts on chomebook. The only regret I have is I should have probably went for newer version with more aggressive curve and USB-C support.
Monitor Stand: AmazonBasics Premium Single Monitor Stand This allows me to bring the monitor forward/backward, up/down or change the angle. This is so much better than having monitor placed stationary. It also allows to free up some space on the desk.
Keyboard: Filco Majestouch 2 Ninja Cherry MX Blue Switch 87 Key Mechanical Keyboard Black This is compact super-loud faceless mechanical keyboard. I love this keyboard and find it to be beautiful. It might be too loud to use if you are sharing space with others, so keep this in mind.
Mouse: Logitech® MX Anywhere 2S Wireless Mouse A nice precise mouse, though I often don’t like how it behaves on Chomebook. Not sure if this is an issue with the mouse itself or ChromeOS (and yes I tried to play with the settings).
Logitech MX Master 3. This is a full size and precise mouse. I am glad I replaced the old small one with this one.
Docking station: Dell WD15 Monitor Dock 4K with 130W Adapter, USB-C While docking station is definitely something to have I do NOT recommend this particular one as it is not fully compatible with newer Macs. My monitor flickers when I connect it via this docking station. Here is DELL’s support page on this. I’m using this station for power, internet connection, web-camera, and any further peripherals I will need to add to my work laptop.
KVM: Sabrent 2-Port USB Type-C KVM Switch with 60 Watt Power Delivery After much of extensive search I gave up looking for a docking station that has TWO usb-c power delivery outputs and also works as a KVM. This seems to be non-existent device. So instead, I bought myself a dedicated KVM. It is simple and it works. Power delivery is not always detected on my Pixelbook, so I skip PD option and use another cable to power my personal laptop on the right.
Power: BESTEK Power Strip with USB for charging devices, powering lamp, and occasional plug-in of things at top of my desk. I also use conventional power extender for low-power things under my desk and directly plug into the wall outlet more power demanding devices (monitor, docking station).
Desk Lamp: Swing Arm Lamp, LED Desk Lamp with Clamp, 9W Eye-Care Dimmable Light, Timer, Memory, 6 Color Modes, JolyJoy Modern Architect Table Lamp for Task Study Reading Working Home Dorm Office (Black) Super happy with this lamp – it can be bent in so many ways. I can recommend this one.
Vertical Laptop Stand: OMOTON Adjustable Something to hold my personal laptop vertically and save even more space. Anyway it is so much more pleasant to work on a large monitor (something I’m doing right now).
External Web Camera: Logitech C920S HD Pro Webcam with Privacy Shutter External webcam has its advantages of providing higher quality image with active focus. Unfortunately I probably need to add some swinging arm or a holder to it as right now I’m placing it exactly where laptop’s camera is and don’t think that my coworkers have even noticed a difference. I’m yet to test if mic is better on it in comparison to built-in one. Some people use dedicated external mics and their sound quality is noticeably better.
Backup power and internet connection: I also have two 20K+ mAh external power banks (one of which is enough to jump-start my car) and 20Gb of mobile internet plan. Based on my 4 hour testing this should take me through a full day of power outage. I know this is not ideal, but I’m also not running a data-center at home nor I have a detached house to buy myself generator or a similar solution. In fact, I do not remember unplanned power outage in my building since I live here and a planned one only lasted 4 hours.
Cables: Well… Everyone is ought to have some wire spaghetti under their desk. Right? I didn’t do anything special about the cables. Just tied some of them together so I don’t hit them with my feet.
Desk and chair: Those are cheap IKEA ones. I’m considering to change the legs of my desk to make it height-adjustable standing desk. As of chair, I don’t think mine is great for 8+ hours of sitting in it.
As of 2021 replaced the chair with Autonomous ErgoChairPro.
Ok, back of my “office”
To complete the picture of my office here is what I have just behind myself:
It is another IKEA chair for mental breaks and a bookshelf which has few books but mostly serves for accessing things I would use time-to-time, like keyboard palm-rest, other headphones, cables and few toys (no, I didn’t reassemble and then assemble the Rubik’s Cube – I can actually solve it). I’m also using the most expensive alarm I ever had which supposedly should help me wake up more naturally during winter months but doesn’t.
Last but not least, pull-up bar (BODYROX Premium Pull up/Chin up Bar) which I occasionally use during breaks. I consider it to be part of my home office as I wouldn’t buy it if I didn’t have to work from home.
No Personal things on Work Laptop
As mentioned above, I’m not logged in with my personal account on my work laptop – this means I cannot open personal gmail, facebook, instagram, twitter, favorite news site, whatever. When I actually need to do something personal I have to specifically log-in into my personal laptop, which means pressing KVM button. This small physical constraint and a clear separation not only helps to be fully compliant with whatever policies there are on the use of work laptop, but also helps to be totally focused on work. I find myself almost not switching to my personal laptop at all during working day (I take breaks, though). Additionally I blocked myself out of all of those distracting social media apps on my phone for working hours and limited their use to 15min/day/app with digital wellbing tools on my phone. I’m super happy about this (thank you, Google). In fact, this also helps me close item #23 on my new year’s resolution.
Your Feedback and Advice
I would be enormously happy to receive any advice from you on what I might be missing in my home office setup and what you would recommend. I understand our situations might be different but we are all in this together and if you have something to share please do so!
11 comments
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Our WFH setup features wide table assembled from IKEA junk department – we found there table top wide enough for two people to sit but not big enough to keep there unnecessary stuff. And also we bought standing desk for our kids. We use it during the day when we both have meetings at the same time (or too tired to sit) and kids use it in the evening adjusting to their height.
I didn’t know there is “junk department” in IKEA – I should check it out. Thanks for sharing.
It’s on the right just before check out. It has stuff that is considered not in a good condition (e.g. it has scratches) or some furniture that was in show room, returned by customers etc.
If you don’t like your mouse. You can take a look at Logitech MX master. It’s one of the best feeling mouse I’ve used. Maybe we can match our mouse and keyboard completely ;) The wire management is spot on though !
Hey, Robert. Added the mouse to my wish list on Amazon. Next time when I’m on the market for a mouse will definitely consider it (likely soon – my wife needs a new mouse).
Thanks! Honestly I tied the wires a bit nicer before taking the picture :)))
Hey Andriy , Wfh setup looks neat and cool! I think you must invest in chair though as I believe it’s worth for the long run. Ergo chair from steel case ( yvr office one) I found very helpful when I hit back pain issue. Though you may have to tap google wfh fund :) as i found those chair expensive ( 500 usd+) !
I am a bit confused how you setup kvm with docking station ? Possible to send connection detail ? I want to setup the same but could not figure out how Monitor can be shared with hp docking station.
Thank you, Amir. KVM is only switching keyboard, mouse, and monitor. So my monitor is NOT connected via docking station. Ethernet and other periphery is connected only to work laptop via docking station, this means that my personal laptop stays on wifi. What I really wanted was to be able to switch all things between two laptops plus have power delivered via single cable, so that I would have 1 cable going to each laptop instead of two.
How is your experience with chromebook? Did you thought about writing separate blog post about it?
I might as well write a separate post at some point in time. This is purely my own opinion and experience so far:
0. This is a private pixelbook, so one of the best chromebooks out there.
1. Using only for all web things, which are like 99% of everything I do privately.
2. It doesn’t have a fan, so I like it being super quiet.
3. It is quick to boot, easy to use, keyboard is nice, feels good.
4. It is 360 convertible into a tablet, so makes it great when I want to take it on a sofa or let my kids play games on it.
5. My phone is android, so I can share apps between the two devices, which adds to usability of the laptop.
I’m not sure I can recommend it as a primary laptop, especially if you need to run heavy apps (games, video editing, IDEs, etc). As a secondary laptop for all things web it is awesome.
Did you get anything else from your WFH fund?
I also bought autonomous ergochair 2 after writing the post. The chair is great. I believe I probably haven’t used 300$.