Desk shuffling

Yesterday I made just one tiny slight change to my desk… and it has made a ton of difference! It’s amazing how just turning something at a different angle can make a space more efficient and effective. And it didn’t even cost anything.

First, a little disclaimer. You will notice a lot of clutter in these pictures. It’s because I didn’t try to clean up or make things look neater than they usually are. This is how my life is, baby. Fighting clutter is an ongoing battle… particularly since I am the main person around the house who has the lowest threshold for clutter. Therefore, when I get busy, the house gets messy! It has been messy indeed lately…

So, pay no attention to the clutter in the background.

Now that I drew total attention to it and now everyone is going to look at everything else in the picture besides my desk, I will continue on to the main subject of this post.

Before: my desk was working pretty well. I had room for my computer and monitor and water bottle and pencil holder and my books, etc. Plus a little workspace to the left. Looks good, right?

Sure. Except, I have started exercising at my desk in order to battle my rising blood sugar. I got an elliptical machine and when I exercised while working, I had to move my shelf forward. If you’re interested in reading my post about this, click here. But here’s a picture to show you how it works.

Well, it has worked great. Except a lot of times, my desk would look like this.

All that clutter that you’re not supposed to look at is really making it hard to see my desk. So I blacked out some of the background so you can see the desk better.

Notice how there is no longer hardly any free space to work on anything. This means if I want a break and just want to sit at my desk and do something, it is a total pain to have to move stuff around.

Then yesterday, I was lying in my bed in the morning, trying to motivate myself to get up. Suddenly an idea for my desk popped into my mind. I jumped out of bed so I could try it. (Yes, what a sad statement to say that one of the things that gets me out of bed in the morning is a new idea of how to reorganize something. No wonder my poor husband has given up knowing where anything is — because I get these ideas frequently enough that stuff is always moving around the house!)

What if I turned my shelf 90 degrees?

That did the trick! No longer do I have to move my shelf back and forth. No longer do I keep losing usable shelf space. I can move my computer back and forth from exercising to sitting position any time and none of my work space changes!

Oh yeah, all that clutter again. Here’s a better view of the desk.

Contrast the photo before and after. Doesn’t look like a huge difference but it is. I didn’t remove anything from the desk or spend money on any additional tools. Just moving a shelf 90 degrees helped create a space that was more functional and that even feels better!