It is a little after seven and I have not started work yet. The blinds are half open, the light is coming in flat and low across the desk, and there are other people in the flat already, in the same room, each doing their own thing. Before I moved anything I took a few…
On 14 August I took four things off my desk, put them in a box, and carried the box to the other side of the flat. Two rules. I was not allowed to throw anything away for fourteen days. And I was not allowed to pretend I didn’t know where the box was, so if…
There is a piece of work I put off for most of this year. I can date the whole thing by what happened to my desk. Productive procrastination is the version of avoidance that leaves evidence behind. You don’t scroll. You don’t nap. You do something genuinely useful, feel the small honest satisfaction of having…
I have read, at a conservative estimate, forty articles about home office desk placement. They are remarkably consistent. Put the window to your side, not in front of or behind you. Don’t face a blank wall. Sit where you can see the door. Keep the desk near an outlet. Leave clearance behind your chair. Every…
Almost every decluttering method in circulation begins the same way: decide what you want to keep, rather than what you want to get rid of. Marie Kondo built a career on a version of it. Joshua Becker puts it as plainly as it can be put — stop asking what you can remove, ask what…
For a while I believed the internet on this one. Every home-office article I read said the same thing, in the same confident voice: don’t shove your desk against a wall like a cubicle — turn it to face the window. Natural light. A view to rest your eyes on. Better mood, better focus. It…
A few mornings ago I opened my daily review and stopped on this: “Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.” — Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks Here’s the strange part. I didn’t highlight that line. I’ve been…
A while back I caught myself doing something that should have bothered me more than it did. I’d spent the better part of an evening — maybe two hours — working through a series of talks I’d been meaning to watch. Good ones. The kind I’d deliberately saved. And the next morning, when a colleague…
The two books that pushed me into my reading slump are still on my shelf. Deep Work and Atomic Habits — both abandoned somewhere around the first-quarter mark, both with bookmarks I’m too honest to remove. So when I finally went looking for a book to get out of a reading slump, I almost made…