You sit at your desk for hours at a time, and if you’re honest with yourself — your setup kind of sucks.
But it doesn’t need to be that way.
With a few key purchases, you can level up your office setup.
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Think a keyboard, new mouse, a pair of headphones etc.
Here are my top five things that you need to level up your office space.
1. Keyboard
If you’re still using your company-issued office keyboard, you need to reassess your life choices.
Because life can be so much better.
My daily driver is a Keychron Q1 HE, currently $299, Amazon Australia.
The build quality is outstanding, the magnetic switches are a joy to type on, and it looks great and sounds fantastic.
But not everybody’s into the big chunky monster keyboards.
And I understand that, so if you’re after something slim, I’ve got something for you as well.
Enter the ALogic Echelon keyboard ($143; Amazon Australia).
Where the Kechron was chunky and heavy, this keyboard is thin and light.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that on a thin keyboard like this, the battery life would be terrible, but it lasts months — literally months — without a charge.
I can definitely recommend this for anybody who’s looking for something on the slimmer side.
2. Mouse
Put simply — there is no better mouse than a Logitech MX Master.
My desk is home to the 3S, which is last generation.
Logitech recently released the MX Master 4, which means that these 3S’s are often on sale.
Whether you pick up the 3S or the 4 you will be getting a fantastic mouse.
Ever since the very first MX Master, these have been the top of the tree for a reason.
Apart from being super ergonomic, it’s also super useful.
With the LogiOptions software, you can map the buttons and scroll wheels to do pretty much anything you want them to do.
For productivity, video editing — basically anything that you’re sitting at a desk for — you need one of these.
3. Headphones
There are two different routes that you can go down here.
Either the noise-cancelling route to block out all of your co-workers, or you can go down the open-back route and allow outside sound through to be more present in your environment.
I’ve chosen the latter, my go to headphones are Sennheiser HD 550 and they’re actually on sale for Black Friday.
Their open-back design is great for listening to music giving a wider soundstage with more separation between instruments.
But another side benefit is when I put them on, I can still hear everybody around me.
So if I’m working on a project and someone in the office needs to have a chat, I don’t need to awkwardly lift my headphones off to the side to hear them.
The HD550s are super comfy. They sound fantastic. And right now is probably the best time to get them because they’re on sale.
Now that you’ve got your headphones, you need somewhere to hang them.
And this is where this sort of personalisation comes in.
4. Lighting
My desk lighting starts with the Nanoleaf Pegboard Desk Dock.
The dock comes with hooks that you can move to where you want to hang your headphones, keys, USB sticks etc.
And you can get these little hook guys that you can hang stuff on. To complement the dock, Nanoleaf also sell RGB strip lighting for behind your monitor.
Through the Nanoleaf desktop app, you can set different scenes to cycle through all your favourite colours. and even mirro the content that is on your screen.
It seems like a small thing, but it’s often forgotten how much lighting can play a part in making your area feel a little bit more homely, chic and exciting.
5. Storage
And last but not least is storage.
When it comes to hard drives, it’s hard to walk past the Samsung T9 portable SSD.
I use the two-terabyte version and it is lightning fast. Whether I’m transferring vision, editing 4K video — you don’t even notice that you’re working off an external hard drive. I genuinely couldn’t recommend this any more.
