Organization — Office 2024
After the kitchen, the office is still the most used room in our home. This is how we have optimized it this year.
About a year and a half ago, I wrote a long entry to this blog about how we keep this office space organized. While much of it is still as it was then, it is also remarkable how much has changed in just sixteen months.
This is a pretty long entry to the blog. I’ve broken it up into two main sections.
- Changelog — Everything I’ve changed in the office this year.
- Inventory — A list of key equipment and materials.
Changelog
I am a habitual optimizer. And since we spend so much time in this space — I and my wife both work from home — I am always noticing something that could be better, easier, simpler. Below are all the changes I made to the office this year.
My Workspace
A point I stressed last year was that I really prefer my desk to remain uncluttered by the infrastructure that supports my work. So, ideally no cords or machines on the desktop. Until mid-year, that meant that most of my work machinery was stored beneath my desk. On most days, that worked pretty well. But every now and then, I would need to access something down there and that’s when I’d regret everything. Yes, everything was carefully labeled and arranged just so, but sometimes that made it even harder to just, you know, unplug something without hitting your head and cursing. Imagine if Tetris blocks were coated in Superglue and then you tried to play the game in reverse. It was like that.
I briefly experimented with a handmade desk riser to see if bringing a few more things to the surface might help. That convinced me that I had to bring everything up. So that’s what I did. I replaced my steel display shelving with a floor-to-ceiling set of 12-16” deep shelves that the desk can slide right in between. Everything I use is on the shelves, including my displays, which makes it a thousand times easier when I need to make a change. Now I can simply pull the desk out and access anything on the shelf — nothing is lower than waist-height and there are no cables tethering the desk to anything on the shelf. It is grand.
I also replaced my display. Check this out: Over the summer, we had such a severe thunderstorm (climate change!) one afternoon that a particularly massive thunderclap above our house knocked over my 32” screen and cracked it edge-to-edge. I took that opportunity to replace it with two slightly smaller (27”) displays. I’ve never been a dual-display person until now; I don’t think I can go back.
Desk Storage
The shelf that supports my new displays floats over my desk with just enough space to allow for some “hacked” drawers I made from some organizer trays and drawer pulls. This is extremely useful.
On the shelves above my desk are small drawers that store office and art supplies.
I love that the drawers are easy to pull out and bring down to the desk for easy access while I’m making something.
Power Supply
We began shutting down the entire office at the end of the night this year to see how much this would reduce our power usage. After a few weeks of doing this, I found crawling under our desks to shut various things down very annoying. We needed something as close to a master kill switch as possible.
I relocated our battery backups to a shelf where I could easily reach it without effort and wired them to a single power supply so we could hit one switch at night to turn everything off. Then I had to figure out the cable chaos that would result from moving the things that everything else plugged into all the way across the room.
To manage all the cables, I built a cable reservoir along the entire back wall of the office. It’s supported by 2x4s attached to the wall studs, and faced with 8” boards so that there is plenty of space behind them for the many cables that run across the room. I have to say, I’m pretty proud of this solution. Not a single cable on the floor.
And there are so many cables.
Bookshelves
I replaced the rail display shelving that covered the wall facing the desk with deeper shelving that matches the rest of the shelving in the room. It’s good.
Keen eyes will notice that not all the brackets match. This is because my local Lowes ran out of the black ones. I eventually got 18 more to swap in here and despite how twitchy the current mismatch makes me, I haven’t gotten around to putting them in yet. I will before 2025 so help me…
Acoustic Paneling
I created three large acoustic panels and hung them from the ceiling (you can see them at this link). I’ve recorded several podcasts from this space and spend the majority of my days teleconferencing. Optimizing the acoustics has been one of those larger efforts that has been rewarded every single day since. Yes, my zooms sound great, but it also just feels good in here. It’s as if this space is hidden away within a mountain.
Tool Storage
Over the past few years, I’d done so many projects around the house that I finally decided to make it easier on myself and hang the ones I used most on a panel mounted to the inside of the office closet door. It was very useful!
But then I began my final big house project of the year, which was to renovate our basement and make it a functional long-term storage and workspace. After weeks of daily trips from the office tool supply to the basement (which you can only access from outside), I realized that I either needed a second set of tools, or I needed to relocate them. So, relocate them I did.
I’m probably going to curse myself next year when I have to go all the way down there to grab a hammer, but for now, organizing them all down in that space was the final piece of a months-long project I was determined to complete before 2025.
And as it turns out, the office tool panel was a good rough draft for the better one I created in the basement (you can see the original one here).
Art
You may have noticed the blue wedge hanging by my desk in the first picture on this page. I replaced an earlier homage to Ellsworth Kelly with a much bigger and better one
Ever since I first saw Kelly’s Blue Panel II (full story here) I have had it burned into my mind. This big, blue wedge is my homage. It’s made from plywood, dozens of layers of paint, and hung from a fancy French cleat to the wall.
That’s it for changes made in 2024!
Office Inventory
It’s astonishing how many objects feel necessary to working from home in 2024. Obviously, only a few of them are truly essential. But, nearly everything listed here is used daily.
FYI, not a single affiliate link below.
If you are somehow still reading this and have any questions, ask me anything! You can email me at butler.christopher@proton.me. I’d love to hear from you.
Written by Christopher Butler on
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