How NOT To Setup Your Home Office
An elaborate guide on how to ensure you end up actually using your perfect dream desk setup.
“Home office setups” are a fad these days. It’s understandable as well with all the pandemic and WFH. Ask Youtube. Ask r/battlestations. There are countless guides/ideas/reviews floating around on how to setup that dream desk you can spend hours and hours on being “productive”. This is the story of how not to go about that dream so that you don’t regret your Amazon order history few months down the line.
The Desk and Chair
IKEA is cool. We know. But resist the temptation to buy a table/chair combo online. Especially if shipping complexities require you to pay double the price.
Step out to your nearest furniture market and you’ll find all sorts of nice desks/chairs for extremely reasonable prices. Oh and you can always test them out to ensure there’s no wobbling (seriously, google that shit and you’ll find horrifying stories of people haunted by the wobbliness of their dream desk). Plus with any luck and some tipping, the vendor would be more than happy to provide you assemblage and delivery.
If you do end up buying one online, make sure it’s not an unassembled one. And if it is, please don’t try to fit all the screws by a makeshift scissor-cum-screwdriver or knife-cum-screwdriver. Especially the knife.
Monitors
They are more expensive than you think. Because if you have a half decent laptop and some semblance of space, you won’t like the cheaper, smaller ones.
Screen size is important. Also the resolution really matters. So does refresh rate. And panel type. Also add curvature. Then there’s this whole choice about the brand.
There’s truly no one-size-fits-all here so don’t mind ending up in a rabbit hole of research over which monitor screen can truly be the beacon throwing comforting light to your productive eyes.
Again, if only you could step out to your local store to actually look at some of the screens, you might be better served. But eventually order online because there are some great discounts, particularly around sale periods.
Oh and anything lesser than 27" is just not enough. 1080p is sufficient for most, 2K is future-proof, 4K is opulence. If you are a gamer go for 144Hz else don’t bother with anything more than 60Hz. Curved displays are an acquired taste.
Monitor Stand
This could have been a subcategory but trust me, this is gonna make or break your whole “aesthetics”. Finding the perfect monitor stand is an arduous, expensive and vain exercise.
Between swivel, tilt, rotation, revolution and whatnot, there’s only so much that you can account for. There’s no unicorn and if there are, they come at a premium. Figure out what features matter to you the most and then buy the AmazonBasics one in the cheapest deal you can find.
Keyboard
Ah the sound of keys clicking as I type this. Mechanical keyboards are a godsend. Everything else is overrated.
For some, the allure of mechanical keyboards is the door to the path that is setting up a home office. Because you’d also need a pointing device and then you discover that using your laptop as the main screen is atrocious so you wanna buy a monitor and before you know, you’re spending exorbitant amounts of money setting up the dreamland where you can type away.
Like all entry-level drugs, mechanical keyboards are also very habit-forming and readily available so grab whatever you can find and go from there.
Pointing Device
You’d be wondering “pointing device” is a very abstract term to use. But hear me out, there’s a “mouse” and there’s the Apple Magic Trackpad. Apples to oranges I tell ya!
Yes, you can buy the latest and greatest ergonomic mouse with wrist support and five crystal balls, but, the elite thing to do is to spend twice as much and buy a trackpad. Because when it comes to trackpad, there’s only one king: the Apple Magic Trackpad and it doesn’t come cheap.
Speakers
Your laptop already has one. But a good desk setup mandates you to use your top-of-the-line laptop in clamshell mode. Tuck the beast away on the side and once you do, make sure to not use the laptop’s speakers.
Instead, buy a monitor with an inbuilt speaker for fallback. And when you realise it’s probably not doing justice to your favourite music, ask someone to gift you a real expensive bluetooth speaker. Probably with home assistant support because you won’t want to press buttons anymore. (You probably also won’t like shouting out the name of the next track while the current one is playing so make sure the buttons are still there though.)
Webcam
So remember laptop in clamshell mode? If you do any kind of meetings where you need to show your face, you’d figure out the need to buy a webcam. And webcam technology really hasn’t evolved as much as you’d hope.
Anything below 720p really would accentuate the uglier parts of your face. To be honest, even the 1080p ones would. (See the section “Lighting” below for remedy.)
Also sit on on your chair and then look back and see what kind of a space you have. It would probably look uglier on a webcam. If that’s a concern, don’t even bother about the ultra-wide webcams.
Lighting
After you take the first zoom call from your new shiny desk setup, you’ll realise you’d need to light up your face. Get ready to experiment with assortments of LEDs, table lamps, clamp lamps, floor lamps and overhead lighting solutions.
And no, even if you setup your desk next to floor-to-ceiling windows, you would ultimately have to take that one important meeting during nights or overcast days and you’d quickly realise the needs for manmade lighting.
Cable Management and other Accessories
So the dream desk is finally ready! But wait, it doesn’t look as good as it was supposed to? Try cable-management and accessories. In that order.
Lack of cable management would really trigger the ADHD in you. Make sure to tuck all loose wires away and once you’re done, do whatever you can to never look back there.
When it comes to accessories, desk mats, laptop stands, mobile holder, wrist rests, wire clips, a wooden hourglass, moon-themed lamps, or that-freakin-cool-levitating-bulb are all good ideas.
Summary
If you kept in mind the above pointers while designing your dream desk setup, you’re probably the owner of a pretty cool office space now.
Give yourself a pat on the back before it cramps up sitting on the chair, high-five whoever you can before your wrist and fingers ache after typing and scrolling for long hours, hold your head high before your neck starts tensioning up staring at the monitor and cry some tears of joy before you get actual ones from looking at the bright screen.