Stand up and work

I’ve long thought that having a standing desk at home would be helpful, but couldn’t quite figure out how to make it work in our house. I have a pretty hefty desk with three screens ( old photo here) and none of the solutions I could find seemed right.

Then I realized, with the help of my wife, that I could just put a second desk right behind where I set — literally swivel my chair 180 degrees and stand up. It works!

I already had the laptop, a Google Pixelbook Go (sort of a high-end Chromebook), so I picked up a few things to help make it work a little better. Really the laptop alone would have been sufficient, but I figured if I could make a more productive place to work, I might use it more often. To go with the laptop, I picked up a cheap HP monitor and a separate keyboard and mouse. The full list of items is at the end of this post.

With just those, I now have a lot better space to work.

Software and syncing

Because my life is essentially 100% in the cloud, going from sitting at the main desk to standing at the Chromebook is fairly seamless. I keep my main tabs open on both (email, calendar, Slack, Notion, etc) so they both stay in sync.

The challenge is with open documents; I generally have 5–10 tabs open with various projects that I’m working on. I can easily open…