Productivity Porn: An Office War Room to GTD

Productivity Porn: An Office War Room to GTD

I’ve posted before about how I keep the physical space around me organized in order to encourage productivity.  These days, I am working from home, so it’s important to keep my work area a productive place.   Here is a visual layout of my ‘war room’.

Taking a step back:

WorkStation

Desk

Organization

Office Supplies

Food, Beverage, and other Nice-to-Haves

Backup

  • A wicker basket with plenty of spare electronic items:
    • plugs
    • ethernet cables
    • USB pen drives
    • monitor stands
    • USB cords
  • Office supplies (staples, notebooks, etc)

Mobility

Organizational Principles

Suffice to say, I think regularly critically about how my physical environment effects my working mental state. I’ve covered largely covered the principles that I use to keep my workspace organized and productive in another post.  To summarize:

  1. Everything has its place.
  2. Most commonly used items are most accessible.
  3. Each product solves a problem. Don’t consume for consumption’s sake.
  4. Don’t procrastinate by focusing on organization when actionable, higher-order work exists.
  5. A common aesthetics matters, but only around the margins.

Other Pro-tips

I like to cover my webcam with a piece of black tape.  Some folks think that that’s akin to wearing a tin-foil hat.  I don’t think so.  There are well-documented cases of hackers taking over remote webcams (even without turning on the remote light), and with the recent revelations about NSA spying on everyday americans, I don’t think we’re so far off from the day when hackers can watch you eat, sleep, make love, and work — all from the comfort / safety of some remote command center.

I gave up coffee for tea.  For various reasons (perhaps enough for an upcoming post), I’ve found coffee to be too strong of a jolt.  The subsequent come-down from the energy is also very strong.  I’ve found tea to be a happy medium.

I work from home, which has lately caused me to go a bit stir-crazy.  I maintain an explicit separation of space between home & office.  It’s helped to keep me from going crazy (a little).

Keep your devices in sync with each other by working from a cloud-based storage system.  I use Google Drive but am transitioning to DropBox.

/soapbox

I hope you found this post on my workplace useful.  If you have any productivity porn or pro-tips, leave me a comment on twitter.

 

 

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