Going deskless

As many may know, I swore off having my own office years ago (2010 to be exact). Main reason: I felt disconnected from the company. Personally, I think the idea of taking your highest performing and most experienced people, and rewarding them by stuffing them into an office, is completely counter-intuitive. I want my team to be able to absorb as much as possible from the most experienced folks! I could argue it makes more sense to have interns in offices than senior employees. But, I digress :)

I’m trying something new for a few weeks at Dragon Army. I’m going deskless. That’s right, no desk.

Here’s what happened. We restructured the game studio room (where I sit) to make it more functional for the team. Only problem is, during that process we went from 7 desks to 6 desks. And with me, we have 7 people in this room.

So I decided to give not having an actual desk a try. The reality is, and I tell my team this all the time, if I’m at my desk too much that means I’m not doing my job. A huge part of my responsibilities are generating new business and forming relationships, both of which require me to be out of the office a great deal. So already, if I was at my desk for 50% of the day, I wasn’t being effective.

I’m holding off on figuring out a way to cram a 7th desk into this room while I see how the “no desk” thing works out. We have couches in the room that I sit and work from now, and in other parts of the office we have countertop areas and conference rooms, so if I needed to sit somewhere more formally, or get a change of scenery, I can do that pretty easily.

For now, my backpack is my “desk”, which is quite liberating because I should be able to work just as easily from a couch, a coffee shop, at home, or on an airplane. I no longer need to be shackled to my desk to be at my optimal performance.

I’ll report later on how the test worked out.

A shot of the new game studio setup…

My “desk”, essentially that backpack and the laptop next to it. I do most of my work right now on that couch.