Workspace of the Week: For all to see
This week’s Workspace of the Week is JeffreyAbbott’s open cubicle:
Working in a cubicle presents a number of challenges, especially when it comes to clutter control and organization. An open cubicle, like today’s selection, magnifies these challenges. Everything must be contained, and the work surface kept as clean as possible even when in the middle of an assignment. Today’s selection does an excellent job at keeping things in great condition. The light is nice because it has an electrical plug on it so you don’t have to crawl under the desk if you want to plus something in to charge. The shelf is nice because it provides an additional level of storage. Overall, this is a terrific setup for an open cubicle. Thank you, JeffreyAbbott, for sharing your workspace with us.
Want to have your own workspace featured in Workspace of the Week? Submit a picture to the Unclutterer flickr pool. Check it out because we have a nice little community brewing there. Also, don’t forget that workspaces aren’t just desks. If you’re a cook, it’s a kitchen; if you’re a carpenter, it’s your workbench.
13 comments posted
Posted by BevAnn - 02/11/2011
How wonferfully nice and soothing! I love it!! Good job
Posted by Anne - 02/11/2011
Just wondering, why do so many of the workspaces nowadays feature two computer monitors? Whatever could they be for? It strikes me as a sort of “look at me, I’m so trendy” kind of thing. What next? Two keyboards?!
Posted by Honkytonkfoodie - 02/11/2011
Personally, I have two monitors in my cubicle because I work with contracts. Two monitors greatly assist the comparison process, especially between documents, emails and proposals. They are also helpful for having multiple items open when I get interrupted and have to shift focus on something else temporarily.
Posted by Fish - 02/11/2011
Wow, retro 4:9 aspect monitors, cool!
Posted by Kris - 02/11/2011
Two monitors is pretty standard if you’re working with large spreadsheets or images. I can’t imagine either my home or work workspaces without two monitors at this point–at work I do a lot of work on remote machines, so the two monitors lets me flip back and forth between my machine and the remote machine easily. At home, I work with huge images, so the ability to have more screenspace so I can do comparisons with the original image is pretty crucial.
(And, really, it’s two monitors, one desktop. To a point, more screen is better. I’m one of those people who likes to have everything in view, so I love enormous, high-resolution screens.)
Posted by Erin Doland - 02/11/2011
@Anne — There are numerous studies that have found multiple monitors increase productivity, starting in about 2006.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04.....asics.html
Posted by SunnyDays - 02/11/2011
I am a web developer and I have three monitors: one for coding, one for previewing my work on a newer monitor, and one for previewing my work on an older lower resolution monitor. If I turn around, I have a MacBookPro to test on. I really could use a few more monitors and computers, actually. There is always one user with a freakishly old system…..
Posted by Anne - 02/11/2011
Thanks for the explanations, everyone. I just got the feeling that some people had the extra monitor as a kind of style statement, but I see that it can be useful for certain people to have a second screen. What I still don’t understand is: does the second screen display the same thing as the first? How do you get one thing on one screen and another thing on another, using the same computer?
Posted by Paul - 02/11/2011
Only two monitors? I work from home and have 4:
main work machine has
17″ 4:3, used for email client and IM
24″ widescreen, main workspace, usually showing a fullscreened remote desktop session into the box(es) at the office;
laptop 13″, used for task list
laptop external 22″ widescreen, used for reference materials, personal email client, iTunes and pretty much everything else.
Admittedly my office is often referred to as ‘mission control’, but even so I sometimes find I could use somewhere else to ‘put’ stuff on the screen. Being able to see everything without fiddling with switching windows or alt-tabbing makes a huge difference when trying to e.g. review technical specifications while crosschecking implementation details or current live system data, with an email open to type review comments into and some reference pages open on the fourth monitor.
Posted by ethan - 02/11/2011
A more pertinent question for most of the photos of “work” spaces in the flickr pool is: Where are the telephones? You know, the ones with wires that plug into the wall?
Posted by Jeffrey - 02/11/2011
The monitors are nice to have, and I’ll take as many as the company is willing to offer
On any given day, I’m working on software documentation, developing custom utilities, testing software and providing edits for coworkers. When writing documentation, the two monitors are useful because I can leave the product on one monitor and keep my authoring tools in the other without having to alt+tab or minimize anything. When developing, it’s nice to keep the code on one screen and references and testing VMs on the other.
To further compartmentalize my workspace, I use VirtuaWin, which gives me 4 (or more) virtual desktops. One desktop holds communication tools, another holds authoring tools and software, another holds development tools, and so on. Very useful tool – and it doesn’t take long to get addicted to.
At home I only use one 23″ 16:9 monitor since all I do is surf, watch videos and edit photos – no need for two screens.
Thanks for featuring my workspace, Erin!
Posted by ninakk - 02/11/2011
@ethan: Companies have dropped the landline and gone mobile, I guess. Where I come from it’s fairly common already.
Posted by Paul - 02/12/2011
@ethan: I don’t have a work landline and don’t need one. My office based extension is on autoforward to my mobile phone and will get me anywhere, and for meetings and other conversations I spend about half my life talking to people on Skype. PC has a webcam with integral microphone so I can just sit and talk at my screen – it’s much more natural than having to hold a handset to my ear, and the sound quality is so much better than the landlines at work or the mobile that it feels like the person is sitting next to me rather than on the end of a looooooonnnnnnggg bit of wire! Some people in the office have also done away with physical phones and just have a headset connected to a Cisco softphone running on their PCs – direct connect to the VOIP based switchboard system, and it integrates with the email and IM clients so they can do click to dial from the contact list.
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