 Hey y'all, welcome back to my YouTube channel, this is Daniel Rossell here. Last week I spent most of the week in Italy on a business trip working out of a hotel frantically for any good stuff done and it just made me realize how much I love my home office and I thought I'd do a little tour. I've done a couple of videos like this way way back when my YouTube channel was in its very early phases but I've made some changes to it since and I thought I'd do another video to show it off. I've been working at home for probably the best part of five years now. Now I definitely don't work exclusively from home, I go to clients, I go to conferences like I did last week but the home office is kind of the centerpiece of my home working lifestyle and I have to say compared to working in an open plan office this is just like so much better. One of the things that I think is very ironic about startup culture and I spent a lot of my career so far working in startups is that it's become common that like even the CEO sits in the bullpen and to me someone with in the past you know anxiety or trouble focusing sometimes it was just impossible to get deep work done in one of those kind of open plan offices where the windows are glass and all you can see are people going around. So I've been working, I currently work for one client as a marketing communications consultant slash advisor for the last three years I worked for a bunch of different clients so always going out of the office for meetings as I said but when I come back here to get my actual work done and therefore I've invested a lot of time and effort in the space it is a rented we do we are renters so therefore I can't make like permanent alterations but I've done the best I can with our contract to make this a really great place to get some work done. So I'm going to show you guys firstly last thing I was thinking I'm going to clean up this place before I do this video and I decided I'm not going to do that because the only time this home office I spend so much time working out of this space the only time it's like perfectly clean is if we're having guests over that's number one or secondly if I'm doing something like a photo shoot which I do every you know six months to keep track of the little improvements I'm making. So I'm going to show you guys some of this stuff I've added that makes it truly my space and let's take a look. All right so the center piece of my home office is this delightful workspace it's a three monitor array going into a desktop I'm not working on anything you know super sensitive so you guys can see what's on my screens I'm editing some video which I'm then on the center screen uploading to YouTube and on the right screen I'm backing it up to my NAS so this is a probably the best value thing I've ever bought is a multi monitor array they're just insanely useful in the past I've worked with one one monitor I've worked with two monitors I personally find three the sweet spot another great thing about these multi monitors these monitor arrays is that they can rotate so if I sometimes I have this I can just literally with my hand rotate it upwards and I can have this in document format but these two in horizontal format so if you don't know where to get these look at Amazon for dual triple monitor arrays they even make like these insane nine monitor arrays for like if you've ever seen the trading store of an investment bank they use those kind of things there the next thing um to point out is this fantastic desk this is a custom uh whole wood desk so what happened was I initially set up this array on an IKEA desk linman or something and it was just like too heavy that um the table started warping within the first few weeks and it was definitely about to break so what I did I went out and I measured up the dimensions now this room is definitely not super spacious by any stretch of the imagination but I'm lucky to have a separate home office a lot of people don't have that so I measured it up and I was like I'm gonna try use every breaking centimeter available to me almost so I got it all the way to here I think it's 150 centimeters in width and it's 90 centimeters in depth and just like I finished this myself the comparison in quality between this and by the way it was not that expensive the custom wood desk there's just the difference in quality between this and your IKEA MDF is a different league but I actually have used IKEA trestles to support the desk I've tried to do my best with cable management using velcro ties but you can see it's a little bit of a mess but it gets the job done so I'm personally next thing to say is I'm a big desktop fan and working from home you really don't want to go offline at any point I need to get these sort of better arranged I'm going to turn that off so I use an uninterruptible power supply or a UPS so that if there's ever a momentary power outage the UPS will kick in and keep my desktop running I even have a little glow in the dark strip so that if the lights go out in winter whatever I can quickly locate the UPS and make sure it's running okay so yeah I also use a desktop computer I'm a huge fan of desktops much more so than laptops I find them just a lot more versatile and given the kind of setup I work from desktops served me just a lot better because I've started doing a lot of video editing work I picked up some studio monitor speakers about six months ago these are I forget the name but it was thanks to reddit and specifically the budget audio file subreddit who recommended these things to me and they're super super powerful but because we live we live in a shared rental building I more commonly reach for just just headphones when I'm editing audio to be honest because they don't they're so powerful in the bass is so loud that they tend to annoy the neighbors one thing I've thought about using I've never really done is a little intercom system uh sometimes I put my phone in flight mode and I figure it'd be good to have some backup so this isn't currently connected but we have one in the living room um now this beautiful beautiful beautiful piece of IKEA furniture this is a modular unit and you can see this has taken me about three years to build and to gradually fill up with storage we unfortunately don't really have storage in this particular rental so basically every almost everything I own from its headstand point is like in one of these boxes I've tried to label them to the best of my ability you can see this is supposed to be brackets rigs and fixtures but uh it's got a bit chaotic over the years so I just kind of have a rough idea so this is where I'm storing my back of media like my m discs etc or in that box and I just try to keep these box roughly organized I'm even using the shelf you may see this room is very hot very high ceiling so I'm just trying to use whatever space I get my hands on here some other cool things or well I think they're cool um I do a lot of video blogs so I record them from this desk I also do conference calls so I have one fill light here and that's using a scissor stand going into this side of the desk and if you come across all the way to my other side of the desk I have a second smaller light here uh what else do I have that I can show you guys caffeine pills for when uh try to avoid using these books for when energy is lagging have a white noise machine which is super super useful if you're living in a noisy area your home office and you need to mask out sounds this thing is electrofan one of my best ever purchases I have a bunch of charging ports because I've got so many microphones and stuff like that at this point and I have one of these usb extenders for kind of the same reason and I have a you basically every single usb port of the computer has something like a micro sd reader coming out of it this is actually a kvm switch uh so my mics and keyboard go in here so if i'm working between a desktop and a laptop I can actually put a second output in that side of the kvm and that will allow me to flick between two different computers with the same peripheral so that's pretty cool cool for geeks I have my adiabatic um speakers which are also amazing for blocking out sounds and that's pretty much all there is to show you guys on my desk as you can see as I said this is going to be in its natural state you can see earphones a lavalier mic for recording my videos and uh if you look over here it just gets worse and worse and worse I've got my camera I've got a usb audio interface I've got a little uh desk here and I have my uh my webcam which I use for recording these blogs now I'm trying to show you guys the important or slightly unique stuff this is my networking stack and I've done a ton of videos about this about setting up redundant home internet so what we have here is my isp router I then have a cellular router the antennas probably need a bit of a adjustment and then this is my tp link load balancer and then this is feeding internet throughout my house so one of the outputs of this ethernet comes to the computer another goes out to the next room where all where there's more networking gear and switches and this basically allows me to have backup internet so I have backup power backup internet um I've done videos on exactly how to set this up uh but this had been probably one of the best investments it looks pretty pretty not significant to look at it just a few boxes but that's what this is it's a isp cellular router and uh load balancing router the next thing that I uh kind of can't live without is my printer I do try to avoid printing stuff as often as often as possible but I have a little compact hp printer and I think that's pretty much all there is in my little show until guys you probably if you watch it in my video blogs you'll see this in the background there's nothing so exciting going on on here besides water bottles and more video stuff but this is actually an IKEA hack it's a double hillus so it's two hilluses uh kind of soldered together again trying to take maximum advantage of the uh high vertical ceilings here and then just so that after that I keep my uh boom microphones tripods monopods gimbals stuff like that and because I you know around my office there's always stacks of paper folders briefs highlighters it's kind of organized chaos but uh this is really where the majority of my work gets done I store everything related to my computing there I have good lighting and these are remote controlled as well these lights so I have a little control and if I can find the power button I can just push a button and I've got my fill light there I can actually adjust the light so this is one of those things that if you're doing a lot of zoom calls investing in a good business quality webcam and some decent lighting you could have three lights I think two is sufficient I usually only use one only big difference to how you appear along of course with a good microphone the home office as it stands on uh where are we in the calendar may of 2022 as I say it's a work in progress so hopefully by the time I make another home office tour video we'll be at the next level but for now I find this is super super productive workspace uh and I'm really happy with it so I hope that little tour was of interest thank you guys for watching