Desktop Tower Move

I didn't want to write this post. I don't want you to read it. My wife wanted me to write it. I hesitated. Writing it forces me to admit that I'm picky and maybe neurotic. So it's probably a good thing that I did write it.

I work from home full-time, so it's imperative that I have a workspace that is my own. I work from our family room. There’s a fireplace, a bathroom, and an awesome sectional that’s great for naps. It also has a closet.

The closet

It's a couple feet deep with bi-fold doors on it. I put a desk and some shelves inside the closet and turned it into an office. I can close the doors and make it all disappear. It’s pretty slick.

The original setup

My powerhouse, the Mac Pro, was sitting off to the right hand side of the monitors. As you can imagine, cords are a nightmare. I found a way to feed the cords down below the desk and keep them organized. It was a lot of work to do it that way, but it's clean.

My completely understandable problem

I began to have rogue gadgets. I have an external disc drive (that I almost never use) and a 7 port USB hub. I also began to plug more and more things into the tower itself. Off to the right hand side of my keyboard and mouse, I also had a notepad and my phones and my pens and notecards and... you get the idea. On the left side all I had was a set of headphones and a cup of coffee. Issue: I'm right-handed.

My brilliant solution

I'm no brain surgeon but I could see that I had to do something here. I was piling everything on the right side--the area I always wanted to use for taking notes or pretty much anything else. I moved the tower over to the left, which sounds a lot easier than it was. I use three computer monitors and they come with lots of cords. I had to move network cables, phone chargers, a scanner, a webcam, my headphone extension, two cables per monitor, wireless router cables, printer cords, power strips, two external hard drives, and even my trash can. I had to move pretty much everything. Oh, except my pen cup. It stayed.

The results

After an hour of work I gained approximately 0 inches of space on the right side. What? Maybe I did something wrong, but when I started using it I realized I had the same amount of space that I did before. But it looks nice! And it feels better. At least, that's what I tell myself.