At the beginning of the year 2023, we had the plan to improve our office desk setup in two ways:
- All desks should be electrically height-adjustable
- All computers should be attached to the desk and not sitting on the floor
Had we known just how much turbulence this plan brings, we might have reconsidered it. But we finally finalized the project last week, just a few days before the year was over.
This blog entry tries to recap the story of the improvement project and mentions some particular products. We really use those products and are not affiliated with the manufacturers.
Our company has ten desks on two floors. A quick survey revealed that we have five electrically height-adjustable desks already in use. The remaining five desks were not really adjustable. Our plan was to move the five existing desks on one floor and equip the second floor with brand new ones. And because we wanted to achieve the second improvement in the same step, we switched the desk model.
Our new office tables are larger than before (180×80 cm instead of 160×80 cm) and definitely leeter. They are so leet, they are even called LeetDesks. Yes, we exchanged our boring classic office desks with modern pro-gaming desks. Our reasoning is that gaming is hard work, too. The nice thing is that the LeetDesks can be equipped with additional accessories like cable trays, monitor arms and the PC holder that would achieve our second goal.
So we ordered five individually configured gaming desks last year. Deconstructing the existing desks and assembling the new ones was an ongoing task. We bought a new cordless screwdriver after the first table.
When the team began to realize that we are really adjusting our work environment from ground up, new ideas emerged. The idea with the most impact was the change from workstation PC to “notebook desk”. Instead of a dedicated office PC in addition to the mobile work notebook, the office desk should accomodate the notebook in the best possible manner.
Ok, we swapped the PC holder with a notebook holder, no big deal. But how do you connect a notebook with many displays? We bought the only docking station that we could find that can drive three 4k displays over displayport cable: The Icy Box IB-DK2254AC. The fourth display is connected via HDMI directly with the notebook.
Now, the “pandemic setup” of displays is extended by a fifth display on one side: The integrated notebook display can be used to host the e-mails exclusively or show the company chat.
Request for picture requests: I don’t have an action shot of a five-displays workplace right now. But if you are interested how the setup looks like, leave us a comment and we try to supply one later.
Because the distance between displays and computer is now fixed-length and much shorter because the docking station adds its cable length, all the existing cables were too long. We had installed cables with a length of 3 meters to enable full vertical maneuverability. Now we switched back to 2 meters (or even shorter).
Not all of our notebooks were capable of driving that many pixels. Some older models had chipset graphics that gave up after the first external display. So we replaced them with newer models with dedicated notebook graphic cards.
Six of ten desks are now converted to notebook desks, which leaves four desks with PC holders and classic tower PCs. Traditionally, our PCs live in a “normal size” tower case, the Fractal Design Define series. This case is too big and too heavy for the PC holder. So we had to transplant the remaining PCs to a smaller case, the Fractal Design Defince Compact. We transplanted two of them and replaced the other ones a little bit sooner with new computers.
There were even more minor improvements that resulted in additional purchases, but those aren’t directly focussed on a single desk. So let’s recap:
We wanted our desks to be electrically height-adjustable and our floor free of computers. We ended up buying five new desks, six new docking stations, three new notebooks, two new computers, two empty computer cases, a bunch of notebook holders and many, many cables. The amount of cables that is necessary to operate a modern computer desk is astonishing.
We deconstructed, assembled, connected and hauled many days. The project ran the whole length of 2023 and racked up material costs north of 20k EUR.
But now, the floor is unobstructed and our work stance can change from minute to minute. And we increased our display count once more!
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