“We” Need a New Desk!

We need a new desk. And by “we” I mean Angela and I need to get a desk we can both use. I know it goes against all things GTD , but for the sake of space, we need to consolidate.

For many years now I’ve had my own room where I do stuff like work, read, play guitar, record, etc… Well, now that we have 2 kids, I need to give up my “Man Cave” so that each of our kids can have their own room. We have a boy, “Carnage”, and a girl, “Mayhem”. We haven’t decided which will move in there. But, I first need to move out and I have a lot of stuff! We’ve figured out where the books and other things can be moved (except for the 7 guitars), but I can’t keep my desk. The desk I have is more of a studio recording desk. It has racks where guitar/recording gear can be placed. Another reason that I have to sell it is that it won’t fit anywhere else in the house! It’s big!

Both of us use laptops now so there is no need to have room for a desktop computer. We need an area to house the printer, writing instruments, an “IN” basket for processing, possibly some reference material and other office supplies. What we would also like is a desk that can “disappear” when not in use. I saw one at IKEA several months back that closes up to look like a corner cabinet.

 

Something like this desk “armoire” (above) would be nice since the only place we have room for a desk is the dining room. If it closes up to look like a cabinet it won’t look like we have a desk in the dining room. The fact that it has shelves in there is a plus since those can hold some of the items mentioned above. Of course, the doors look like they’d be a little in the way. It would be nice if the doors slid into the cabinet after you opened them like some TV cabinets do.

Something like this black cabinet and hutch (below) would go nicely on the other side.The doors open to be flush with the sides. I like all the storage that this provides. The printer can fit underneath. There’s plenty of room for both of our laptops. There’s even a file drawer at the bottom to fit my 43 folders! The problem is that the “writing area” would have to be the keyboard drawer. You can’t push a chair into this desk. I’m a little heavy-handed, so that thing would probably not last.

The drop lid workstation below is very nice, except for the $1000 price tag. If we went with something like this, the dining room table would have to be moved when the lid was open. I do like all the storage though and the computers could be hidden away nicely.

We’re  open to any suggestions. We have a big dining room table ( 60″ x 60″ ) and I guess that could be used as a writing area. We then would just need some sort of “office supply holding area” where our pens, pencils, inks, notebooks, and other paraphernalia could live. Also, the laptops have to sit and charge somewhere away from Mayhem and Carnage.

Do you have a writing/laptop desk that you love and think would work for us? Please let us know what direction you think we should go or where we could look for a desk. Thanks for your help guys!

KILL Procrastination

Today, I saw this inspiring slideshow on my friend Hoo’s site. It has very good pointers on redeeming time. I’ve been very busy the last several months, but I know that there were pockets of time that I just let slip away. I’m glad that no one was following me with a camera every day because I don’t want to know what all those little moments add up to.
I must have subconsciously known that I had been wasting time here and there because I’ve been listening to my GTD audio book on the way to and from work again. My mind was trying to tell me that I was not taking advantage of EVERY moment and could have been doing more by being more organized and staying current.
Well, the massive project that we’ve been working on all year will reach a milestone this week where the work will taper off and I’ll get even more breathing room. It’s nice to know where the finish line is. But even if I didn’t get a break, I know that I’m re-implementing the tools and habits that will allow me achieve a “mind like water“.

Getting (more) Organized Pt.2: The Office

Like I said in the previous post, we got the bug to organize more stuff at the end of 2010. My office has been bugging me for months now. I have been purchasing a bunch of notebooks, pens, and pencils since relapsing into my stationery addiction so I had stuff everywhere. I was stacking notebooks wherever they would fit on my shelves. I had a drawer that was bursting from the amount of pens that I had ordered and it was all overflowing onto my desk.

That last one was the main thing that I wanted to tackle. I wanted my pens to be nice and orderly. So, since pictures tell 1,000 things more than letters and such as, here go the before and after shots:

Bottom drawer before...

...and after.

Middle drawers before...

...and after.

Top drawers before...

...and after.

What you see above is my little storage drawer cabinet wood thing that I bought at IKEA over 10 years ago. (I painted it black myself) My desk is more of a studio recording desk so it has no drawers. This is my only storage for writing instruments besides the pencil cup you see and a plastic desktop organizer. I bought those mesh trays from the Container Store. I keep the pens/pencils for everyday use in that cup and the organizer that lives on top of my desk. This drawer thing sits to the right of me. Also, across the top you can see my Pilot G-2 pens that range from 0.38mm to 1.0mm. And of course my little toro from Madrid.

I took these pictures before I received my Niji 400s and 500s from Pencils 11, and before adding the Kuru Togas to the mix. So, that will add 8 more mechanical pencils into that bottom drawer.

Can you tell what’s in each drawer?

Getting (more) Organized Pt.1: The Kitchen

The last week of the year found us trying to get even more organized than we already think we are. Neither one of us likes to waste the precious time that we don’t have trying to look for something because it’s not where it’s supposed to be.  The keys, wallet, and phones are always in the same place. The kids’ toys get put away into baskets every night. DVDs are alphabetically arranged on the shelves. Books are arranged by category and alphabetically by author. Bills and things to be processed are put in an “Inbox”, and so on. It may sound borderline OCD but doing this gives us more time to do the things that we want to do like playing with the kids. I mean, who wants to always be cleaning or picking stuff up just so you have space to sit on the couch? We tackled a couple of areas before the new year.

A week before the new year, the door on our pantry fell off the hinge. It had done that before several times until it finally broke. I had replaced the hinge and the door was better but it kept falling off. I think the reason it kept having problems was that there was too much weight on it. The previous owner of the house installed custom cabinets and went a little overboard on where he put the shelves. He added press board shelves to the door and I think that exceeded the weight limit of the hinges. So this time, I took the door off and removed the shelves from the door. Now, I told you that story in order to tell you another one. Since the door was off the shelf for a couple of days, Angela could see into the pantry every time she walked by. The fact that she had to take everything that used to be on the door and make it fit into the pantry made it look crowded in there. So, long story short, after a trip to the Container Store, certain items have found perpetual homes.

We  purchased containers that could hold all the rice, flour, sugar, corn, beans, coffee, grains and cereal. We buy 25 pounds of rice at a time so it’s hard to find containers for it that will fit in the pantry. We got a large one to house the large part of it and a smaller container to be able to grab and measure out. Of course, my GTD-inspired labeler came in pretty handy so that we now keep everything nice and orderly.

Next is getting enough containers to house my son’s cookies, crackers, and other snacks so that we can get rid of those red and purple boxes. Those aren’t very airtight after being opened.

Did you do any New Year’s consolidating / rearranging?

Part 2 (My Office) coming up…

Hard Drives

1 = 8 !

We have tons of hard drives here at my work. The problem is that most of them are REALLY OLD. And since they are very old, they are small. Not small in that they take up a lot of room, they’re actually physically huge, small as in they don’t have a lot of space. Since we have gone tape-less, we need more storage for older shows and footage that we have to back up. In the past we could get away with the smaller storage drives since all the footage was on tapes. We could erase the footage off the computer drives and just backup the project files that referenced that footage. If we ever needed to update a show or use the footage for anything else, we could open up the project file, pull the tape, recapture the footage onto the server and be back in business. By going tape-less, we no longer have that luxury. When we have to back something up, we have to back all of it up! There are no tapes that have the footage on them stored offline. We have to not only save the project files, graphics, and audio associated with every project, now we have to save all of the footage as well. That means we need much more storage than before!

The picture above shows one of our newest back up drives next to 8 older ones. The new one (on the left) is a 2Tb (Terabyte) drive. Each one of the eight on the right are 250Gb (Gigabytes). Therefore, the single drive on the left can store as much information as all eight on the right. Hard drives have become so cheap now as well. The new 2Tb drive cost less than just one of those 250Gb drives did back when we got them! Sometimes technology is awesome.