Throughout my college career and ever since then I’ve been fascinated by the way professors and other men and women of learning organize their studies. Some would say that makes me a connoisseur of office chaos, and I’ve seen enough hideously messy offices that I’d be hard put to refute it. But my real fascination has always been with people who deliberately create a space for thinking, writing and research. It’s one thing to jam a couple thousand books, one or two filing cabinets, a desk and a chair into a room and call it a study. It’s quite another to actually work on a room, carefully arranging things so that you take maximum advantage of natural light without inviting the distraction of looking out the window. Or organizing things so that you can always lay your hands on exactly what you need when you need it. If you want to do intellectual work on your own, you need your own workspace. And believe me, the impact of a good workspace—one truly suited to your temperment and working style—is huge (Parents with school-aged kids, take note).

French scholar A. G. Sertillanges wrote in his classic work The Intellectual Life (1934 edition), “Do you want to do intellectual work? Begin by creating within you a zone of silence, a habit of recollection, a will to renunciation and detachment which puts you entirely at the disposal of the work…” That inner “zone of silence” Sertillanges refers to is much easier to attain if you have a workspace that is comfortable, free of distraction, and well organized.

My study. Photo by the author.

Lifelong learning guru Ronald Gross once observed that it’s no accident that the classic word for self-improvement —study— is also the name of a place. Try to find some space that is well away from the more frequently-used parts of your house or apartment, a space you can make uniquely yours. A corner of a room will do, but use the bedroom only as a last resort. Try to get light from two opposite directions; a wall with a window should also have a lamp on that side to take up the slack after the sun goes down, plus another light on the opposite side. Check out A Pattern Language (Christopher Alexander, et al) for some wonderful insights into what should go into “a room of one’s own”.

Shelving. I prefer wall-mounted brackets. They feel more open and are relatively easy to install. It’s hard to have too many shelves. For work areas, I prefer having two work surfaces. One is a small, ordinary desk for the computer, spreading out projects, etc. The other has a tilted editor’s writing board I ordered from Levinger’s. It is just the right angle for writing, editing, or reading. I can work at it for much longer than at an ordinary desk and not end up with an aching back. Get a good, comfortable task or desk chair at a used office furniture store or repo-depot.

The secret to a functional workspace is keeping order. Find, buy, or build boxes or files for folders and projects and use them! Add whatever touches you need to make the space your own, to make it feel comfortable. Get a large wastebasket. Finally, one last rule which, if adhered to religiously, will greatly improve your productivity: Desktop space is work space, not storage space. Banish desktop accessories. If clutter starts to creep in, stop whatever you’re doing and deal with it. It saves more time than you’d think.