The PERFECT Desk Setup!

I spent the last 2 years working on this setup right here I've gone through about 50 different products I've injured myself many times using bad ones but through constant refinements I think we've got to the stage now where this is the most productive healthy dreamy but realistic way to work so we'll start with a few quick ones and we'll keep track of the budget as we go here okay my laptop is the M1 Max MacBook Pro I got it 2 years ago and it's been such a smooth sailing experience that it's one of the only times I've had not even any desire to upgrade to the very latest it's fast the screen is perfect and the battery life just keeps going my webcam is my iPhone all you need is a cheap Mount that sits on top of your monitor and you already have way better quality than any default webcam would have you got the ability to look down although I'm yet to find a proper use for that plus the really cool thing is that at any point during your call you just take your phone off and have a look around with it I mean the quality difference is wild we got a 3D printed plant pot that's from Etsy and a banana those are for my enjoyment and I've actually kind of gone to the dark side with a wireless charger I've been fighting against wireless chargers for a long time because current wireless charging is slow it generates more heat this one's pretty expensive and it's not really Wireless is it but what's made me go for it is three things the first that for me to be productive on this setup I need to be able to focus it's got to be as clean as possible it's just not inviting to work at a messy desk and so even if this gadget can hide one cable for me that's a worthwhile investment but it's not just that this is a two in one it charges my phone and it charges my earphones which is such a nice to have because while I charge my iPhone every night by just plugging get into my laptop I've never managed to get into the rhythm of keeping my airpods charged so often times when I've left to go away somewhere in a hurry I've had to do so with like 30% left not anymore and then three is that iPhones need to be both on charge and horizontal like this to activate the new standby feature which I thought I would never use but has ended up being a really neat way to still be near your phone see what you need to see be reachable but with your phone just out of arms length so you have to think twice before picking it up okay time for the six things that really make this setup special start starting with a desk this is the Magnus Pro and on the surface it might seem like this slightly cringe desk but for gamers with the way it's marketed and this customizable RGB strip but there's two reasons that I've ended up sticking with it one is that it's both a sitting and a standing desk and it does both of those things really well I mean for starters it's got presets so number three is what I use it on when I'm standing number two is what I use it on when I'm sitting and then number one is what I set it to when my fianceé disa wants to work on it but also you get a lot of cheap sit stand desks where the extra moving Parts introduce a bit of rattle you forgive it at the start cuz you find the concept of the desk so cool but longer term you grow to hate it and so the fact that this desk is made of solid steel is a massive Pro and the fact that the height adjustment is so smooth and precise is really cool because it's not just that you use it to move between the sitting and standing positions but you're also using it to calibrate those sit stand positions precisely to you such that your arms are not angling up like this but instead resting at 90 to 120 ° that's the ideal position which can be assisted with forearm rests like you see here these are beautiful by the way they make your arms feel like they're getting a warm hug from below and then if you ever don't want to use them you just press the levers underneath and they're gone and then the second part of this desk is the organization this is designed for people who just don't want to ever see cables for example almost the entire thing is a magnetic surface which lets you do really cool stuff like use these magnetic anchors to pin down cables and keep them straight but in a way that's not permanent cuz if you ever want to move it around you just give it a tug and out it comes or like this is a headphone SL banana Mount but again it's magnetic so to take it off you don't need a wrench plus it even lets you do stuff like put magnetic cable enclosures on the side of your desk so let's say you had a massive desktop PC mounted on the floor and all your cables were traveling up just root them through this so they're not sprawled out like the technological equivalent of the Amazon rainforest I like the fact that the control panel is baked into the desk as opposed to sticking out like it does on most but my single favorite thing is this power cable in the basee of the leg which I realize seems like a really weird thing to get excited about but what it means is that this is the only power cable you will ever see because it takes the power into the desk roots that power up through the leg of the desk into an extension Port that sits behind which means yes every single Gadget that sits on your desk can now connect to a power source that's like directly behind it and all the loose cables can fall into the dedicated Cable Management tray which from the front you cannot see it's such a perfect solution cuz usually with a standing desk you have to think twice every time before adjusting the height cuz trust me going from the sitting to the standing position while realizing that your monitor's power cable is only just big enough for the sitting position it's a very expensive mistake which if everything is wired into the desk itself which will be moving up and down alongside the tech on it you don't need to worry about making you do have to build it yourself though to save on international shipping cost I guess and that is a mild pain in the bum but hey if you're enjoying this video then a sub to the channel would be [Music] Indescribable and then on it we have our Mouse and our keyboard so this is the Logitech mxm 3s it's quite a popular Mouse and if you know me you'll know that I like finding products that are a bit less mainstream a bit off the beaten path but I just keep coming back to this one it's a combination of the shape you wrap your hands around this and you think oh yeah it's got this really fancy matte finish fairly quiet but still satisfying Mouse clicks it's got an electromagnetic scroll wheel that's both really fast at scrolling while making it feel like you're in complete control and the ability to intuitively scroll sideways which is one of the first things you notice you're missing when you move from a trackpad to a mouse and it's just nice and weighty in a way that makes you feel like a true executive when you're doing office stuff and there's not too much movement but then equally if you ever want to game where you'll be moving your mouse more like this then you'll want to go for something lighter and then the keyboard which I've talked about before but this is the Logitech oggo k860 and it's not an obvious choice it's not a mechanical keyboard it's using the technically cheaper to make membrane Tech and I mean look at at it it's not exactly a fashion show but this keyboard has gone a long way towards saving my hands it protects your joints with the fact that the keys are cushioned and the weird shape of it actually helps to reduce back strain which I realize sounds like a really strange perk for a keyboard to have but try something for me so hold your arms out and then rotate them in with not you Josh but yeah try this put your hands out and then rotate until your hands are flat your normal typing position that should be noticeably less comfortable because you're pulling your hands through an unnatural rotation I know it might sound like a minor niggle but because an average office worker might spend eight hours a day for 50 years of their life doing these minor mistakes they can build up to cause some major problems now I will say it's not a perfect keyboard it takes up a lot of space it doesn't have backlick keys but then on the flip side the battery life insane I've been using this for over a year and a half and I still haven't changed the AAA batteries that came with it now I also realized the overall budget to this setup is creeping up but I'm doing this from the perspective of this is the best of the best stuff and you don't need to get all of it just use it as a guide to fill in the blanks that you currently have okay so at this point you might be thinking desk seems pretty solid but Aaron that's not a real chair and you''ll be right but here's the thing sitting properly upright for long periods of time it can be tiring cuz you're effectively having to keep the stabilizing muscles in your abs and your back engaged at all times you do that anyway when you're standing but it's just that when you're sitting on a nice comfy luxurious office chair the Temptation is to relax those muscles or in other words to slouch and that can give you some temporary relief but the thing is we were not designed as humans to be in a slouching position so doing that for long periods of time it can put pressure on your organs it can disrupt your digestion it can cause misalignment with your spine and like a hundred other things and so you can do yourself a world of good just by reducing the amount that you do that and I've come to realize that one way of forcing myself to achieve this is a stool that doesn't let you slouch there's a particular reason why I've stuck with this one it's height adjustable so I can use it drisha can use it it goes high enough that you can kind of use it as a support while semi standing and then when it does get get tiring which it will because this is more active sitting than slouching in a comfy office chair I just see that as a good time to get up and do something else for 10 minutes that's good for your body but it's also good for your eyes cuz your eyes relax when not forced to look at something right in front of them ah but then there's one more thing this stool wobbles meaning that you get this natural bit of motion in during your sitting sessions just enough for your body to not switch off and it's also a comfort thing if one position gets boring or you just feel like doing something a bit different you can and then what works so well with this is the floor props so this one here is the QB go you know when I was doing that Fitness transformation last year and I was making all of those different changes to try and sort myself out well the single most powerful thing that I did during that transformation was my walks I do one walk 20 to 30 minutes every single day and even if that was the only change I'd made I still probably would have had 50% of the results so I've been trying for a long time to integrate that concept into my desk setup I tried a vibrating pad which was pretty fun but just didn't burn calories at nearly the same rate I tried a treadmill but it was unsustainably massive made lots of noise and I also kept finding myself getting lost in my work and accidentally placing my foot into the mechanism on the inside of the treadmill so in the end I decided to go for an elliptical and the QB go has just been the best one I've used my complaint would be that it doesn't feel very high-tech with its calculated like display but it's basically silent it's super low impact on your joints the screen lights up so you can see it clearly and lower light and basically the whole thing is made of nylon and is on Wheels so it's super easy to move around which I do and I know it sounds excessive like what kind of madman tries to be productive while also having a workout at the same time but the way I see it if you just create the opportunity it will just happen naturally you kind of use it as a footrest to start with and then when your feet are there it's just like oh I might as well move them around a bit and before you even know what's happened you're in a flow state with your work you're getting loads done your core is active and your legs are burning an extra 150 calories per hour and then this is the fluid stance board it's basically like the wobble stool but to use when you're standing it's annoyingly expensive for what it is it's basically some foam strapped to some recycled plastic but it is the best board I've used in that it lets you roll around in all directions in a way that activates your core and allows you to shift around if you get uncomfortable and it's also just a bit of fun you only first discovered an office chair and you sat there whizzing round and round it's kind of like that it makes the idea of standing much less unappealing than it can be okay you can't have a perfect setup without talking about lighting good lighting is the difference between Clear Vision and great focus and ie strain problems and a messed up sleep cycle and honestly the more that I've used this Ben Q Halo light the less I felt like it's a gimmick and the more I felt like this is the desk lamp done right so for starters the fact that it mounts onto your monitor is already a massive win because it's one less stand that needs to sit on your desk and take up that valuable space plus it can wire in from the back so you never see a cable and then you've got the actual light it creates the first thing I like is that it projects light in front of your screen to light your desk and what's on it while purposefully avoiding the glare on your screen that would come from a lamp that sits to the side I'm quite lucky here cuz I already work in a room that gets lots of sun but if you don't then having a bright light source that you can set to Daylight colors will make a massive difference but then what's really cool is that as the light starts to dip it can also project light behind your screen think about it this way if you're sitting in a dark room and you're trying to focus on a bright screen then your eyes are simultaneously trying to increase light and also restricted which can very quickly lead to eye fatigue and then cause headaches so should you just turn the room lights on well yeah that would kind of fix that problem but then you'd have to deal with Reflections or glare on your screen that will make the image look hazy and less contrasty so the ideal is to have something called bias lighting which is light that spills behind and around your bright screen so your eyes are less confused but doesn't directly shoot towards your eyes and affect your perception of the image like check this out so you know how that middle rectangle is getting darker as you go from left to right yeah well it actually isn't this is an illusion showing how if the background around your image gets gets lighter your perceived contrast within the image will rise even though the image itself isn't changing and then the most important aspect of this is the color temperature so we've got two of these lights they're both synced up to one of these Wireless remotes which mostly works as expected but is a bit finicky and essentially you can use this to swivel the brightness level or you can use it to make the lighting cooler during the day which will give your eyes a signal to stay more alert and then you can shift that to warm light for those late night sessions so you can still see what you're doing but just in a way that's not reactivating your body's wakeup response and then we can't not talk about the piea resistance this is LG's 5K Ultra wide and let me tell you for the longest time I've avoided using a monitor I've always been this hardcore laptop guy who migrates from room to room either in a cross-legged position or leaning over on the floor basically all the things that you're not meant to do but that you just end up doing because that's what you feel like in the moment but if you really wanted to optimize then you should try to build a setup where your neck can be kept in a neutral position not looking up at your screen not looking down down at your screen straight on and a monitor is just a really good way to do that especially if it's on an arm like this because as well as freeing up that valuable desk Space versus a stand it means you can move it to whatever position makes that alignment happen there's the productivity side of it I'd gotten so used to fiddling with two windows side by side on my MacBook that for a long time I'd almost shut myself off to even the possibility that on an ultra wide screen using an app like rectangle you can just snap one window into one half and the other right next to it working on this screen has been good for my eyes good for myse NE good for my productivity but also I know that I like sitting on a floor or curled up on a couch so my number one priority with this entire setup was to make sure that as well as being the healthiest place to work to make sure that I actually use it instead of the floor it also has to be the easiest way to work and so what I really really love about this monitor is that with one single Thunderbolt 4 cable the image can feed from my laptop to the monitor meanwhile the power can feed from my monitor to my laptop so I've just made it as easy as possible to plug myself into to this setup and as soon as I'm plugged in there's a sense of being settled like I don't need to go anywhere to grab a charger and then if you don't go for the monitor approach I would still recommend you get a laptop stand just for the sake of your neck this is the one that I've been using for a few months and I do think it is the laptop stand perfected because it's super rigid it's easily rotatable and very fun to do so it does not Flex from the position that you first set it in it's got one leg instead of two which reduces its footprint on your desk and it's just super dense like you don't move this no one moves this now let me show you how I can take this to the next level with the Opera desktop browser so I tend to keep my slack so all my team stuff happens on the right my writing in the middle and then my left is all the internet browsing stuff that I tend to do the thing with the browser though is that it's the most versatile tool that most people use it's what you use to do your shopping it's what you use to buy tickets it's what you use to consume content and so part of the reason why I like Opera is that it allows me to easily switch between these different modes without taking up any more than a third of my screen so all of my YouTube Tabs are stored in this blue tab Island shopping is in red research is in yellow and check this out whenever you're in a specific tab Island you have two plus buttons you can either add a new tab which will create a new tab in your next tab island or you can hit this Mini Plus to add a new tab within the island you're in it's a level of organization that makes me very happy and a level of Animation smoothness that makes this feel like a continuously slick setup plus I do also use this picture in picture mode quite a bit when I want to take a video that I was watching there and drag it around to the rest of the screen so download the latest version of the Opera browser it's the best browser for tech fans

Channel: Mrwhosetheboss

Views: 4,047,080

Keywords: tech, desk setup, work from home, monitor, keyboard, setup, gaming, office, productivity

Id: JHJN1t3uIng

Length: 15min 33sec (933 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 30 2023