Office and studio tour 2021

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Our resident mad scientist, ZDNet contributor and distinguished lecturer David Gewirtz, shows you his version of a modern-day wizard's tower.

Welcome to my home office tour. This is actually just one of four areas in the house where I regularly work. The tour you'll see in the video above shows you where I do most of my serious writing, video editing, and research. I also use it as a talking head studio for interviews and Zoom meetings.

Many of you have seen my workshop and fab lab spaces in previous videos. Those are where I do most of the DIY IT projects for ZDNet. At some point, I'll show you a more in-depth tour of each. I also work by our living room TV. I have a monitor and a computer mounted to a side table. I put this in when our puppy was a baby and wanted company all the time. I've kept it in because it's a great place to do my morning reading and email. Plus, having the little pup sitting on my lap while working is a great joy -- although he's definitely not happy with that plastic keyboard thing I use when I should be petting him.

We moved into this house about two years ago, so a lot of this is a work-in-progress. That said, my workspaces are always works in progress, whether I've lived in them for just a year or so, or five or six years. I'm always improving and optimizing my environment to gain productivity advantages.

The office I'm showing you in the attached video is a wonderful space. Of all the home office spaces I have had, I think this is my favorite. It's nice. It's comfortable. It's big enough to do a variety of things. I'm able to integrate both the studio and my desktop with one pretty powerful computer. I love it. And I hope that as you folks build your home offices, you're able to do the same.

One thing I hear from a lot of folks newly working from home is that they don't have anything like the spaces us long-term work-from-homers have set up. It's true. But none of this happens overnight. I'm going to point you to a video I did just before I moved here. That showed how I worked out of a kitchen in a rental house while we were trying to find the new house that we're moving into.

I want you to see that because it's also possible to work from almost any location if you put some intention into it, think it through, and optimize it based on what you've got. I've worked out of the car out of hotel rooms during hurricane evacuations. I've worked out of a little nine by nine-foot square room. I've worked out of this wonderful space. I even worked out of our living room, which was great until we got the puppy and then it became unmanageable.

The point is that I've worked from home for about 20 years in a wide variety of settings and I got the job done. Each time, it's had a different personality. Each space was optimized differently. Setting each up took a bit of work, but as I showed you, you can do some of these things without a lot of expense. In the accompanying video, I showed you the credenza that I put together that was half of an $8 piece of wood and some file boxes.

You can be creative and create a really effective home office environment even if you haven't been doing it for 20 years and constantly looking at ways to make it better. If you're starting out now, just focus on what you need. Focus on giving yourself a quiet space where you can concentrate. And then don't be afraid to think outside the box and create a space that works.

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