My workspace is a mess. There’s so much stuff on my standing desk that it’ll no longer stay at standing height - it just slowly … sinks … down.

To remedy this, I want to minimize the amount of stuff on my desk. There are a few fun problems to solve along the way, but first let me show you how it looks today.

My Desk Today⌗

I use my desk for both work and personal activities. It currently holds (from left to right, roughly):

  • My work laptop (and dock) on an arm
  • A KVM under the laptop
  • My main 32" monitor on an arm
  • Speakers under the main montior
  • Keyboard and mouse
  • 2x 21" aux monitors on arms
  • My desktop PC

The Ideal Desk of Tomorrow⌗

Ideally, I’d like my desk to only hold two 32" monitors, keyboard & mouse, webcam, and headset. Both PCs should exist elsewhere with minimal connections to the desk (initially on a shelf, eventually in a rack).

I’d also like to improve the KVM situation. My current setup uses a single KVM that can switch the monitors back and forth between my work and personal PCs. Instead, I’d like to be able to swap the monitors between PCs independently:

Monitor A Monitor B
work work
personal personal
work personal
personal work

To accomplish this, I’ll use two single-monitor KVMs. I’d also like to be able to swap my USB devices independently of the monitors, so I’ll have a separate USB switch for that purpose. And just to make it a tiny bit more complicated, I want to be able to switch my mouse and keyboard independently from my headset and webcam, so I’ll actually have two USB switches.

Q: Why don’t use just RDP into your work laptop from your personal PC?

A: RDP is disabled on my work laptop :(

To recap, here’s what the new landscape is:

And here’s what it looks like:

Now you might notice that the KVMs and USB switchers aren’t sitting on the desk, so how am I going to swap between them?

That is the topic of Part 2: The Switch.