HELP! I need to figure out how to set up all my junk

Posted on Wednesday, Mar 19, 2008

So my cube/desk is getting a little less than optimal in terms of layout and design. I would like to figure out an ideal situation for my little work-house.

If you would like to offer up your opinions, please click through.

First of all, some background as to WHERE my cube is. I am at the end of a row up against a wall (and yes, I have a “window”, sort of). The two cubes in front of mine are where my staff sits – the cube opposite mine is the DBA manager, and the other row is made up of DBAs. Here you can see how our row looks:

Hallway view

Here’s an overview of my cube:

Overall of desk/cube

To the left of the picture above is the “front” of the cube (what faces out towards the main aisle). “Behind” the camera is the aisle between the cubes. To the right is the wall/window.

This is my main work area:

Cube overview

I have a laptop in a docking station that connects to my large, wide-screen monitor. The display on the laptop is kind of cruddy (1024×768) but my monitor is much nicer (1680 x 1050). On the bottom left, you can see the file cabinet in my cube, which consists of two desk-type drawers and one full-sized drawer for hanging files.

Now something annoying:

Underside of desk

If you look closely, you can see that the bracket holding up my desk is right underneath my laptop. If I sit squarely so that my legs are under my laptop, sometimes I bump my knee against this bracket, which hurts. There is a similar bracket on the right side of the desk, which is under my phone, but I haven’t bumped into it yet.

Here’s the other side of my desk:

Cube wall view

I know, it’s a mess. But you can see that I have a phone, and actually a fair amount of desk space that is being used as, well, “near-line storage” (read: “a place to put junk I haven’t figured out what to do with yet”)

And finally, the “back” of my cube:

Back of cube

I put this picture in here to illustrate that I don’t really have room behind me, and definitely no space to hang anything.

So first of all, I want to figure out how to lay-out my phone, monitor, laptop, mouse, and keyboard for optimal use. Right now I’m not really leveraging my monitor (I still end up doing most of my stuff on the laptop display, which seems wasteful). I have it set up to span the desktop, because mirroring it seems like a waste (the big monitor would be at 1024 resolution then) and to just have it display on the monitor alone takes away from multi-monitor, which I really like having.

I have larger organization issues as well (which are apparent). Any feedback or suggestions for optimization of ANY of this workspace would be appreciated.


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