Four-Eight-Four [dot org]

Over the weekend, I finally got myself in gear and bought a desk for my brother. It’s about time. The guy has been working for me here in town since July, and I’ve been making him work on an ancient typewriter stand that rattled when he typed.

Bringing the desk in on Monday touched off a weeks worth of re-arranging in the office. At some point on Tuesday, I made it my goal to rid the office of any sort of junk that I hadn’t used in months. Anything that I might possibly use was sent to the closet (which was emptied of pretty much anything not office-related).

I even managed to mount a ceiling fan on Tuesday, which really has improved the air circulation in here.

I’m not completely done yet, but I would guess that I’m 95% of the way there. Right now I have a very clean office that is a genuine joy to work in, and there is plenty of floor space, even with the two desks and umpteen computers. If somebody had told me two weeks ago if I could have gotten this much usable desk/table space in here and still been able to walk around, I would have laughed in their face.

Once upon a time, my father had a thingamajig that he kept on his desk that said “A cluttered desk is a sign of a genius” (or something like that). In the past few months, I’ve become a big believer in the idea that a cluttered desk is a sign of somebody who isn’t getting as much done as they could. I started trying to keep my workspace more clean a while back, but with this most recent cleanup, I really do feel more productive.

Some photos of my workplace zen:

My Workspace

Philip’s Workspace

The Bookshelves and my Pipe and Cigar Stuff

Note: The rackmount server you see to the right of Philip’s workspace isn’t always going to live there … it’s just being prepped as my backup server, and will probably go live in the datacenter in the next week or so. It’s my fourth server! I never thought at the beginning of the year I would have gone from one server (running six virtual servers) to four servers (with two running ten virtual servers). Amazing!

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