The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft a-gley.
“To a Mouse” by Robert Burns
Before getting into the rest of this article, I will quickly point out that I now understand the plight of all of those food blogs in finding the right balance of context with the recipes that people are looking for. I’m hoping that as you read these, you’re also interested in not just the different desk setups I make, but also why I am setting up the desks and the journey I took to get to these different destinations. You might be curious about the things I’ve run into while traveling.
For this particular article regarding my July 2021 road trip, I truly wasn’t sure how best to structure it. Do I tell you about the trip chronologically or around the different desks I set up? Do I tell you the crippling anxiety I had while starting the journey and how I decided to cut the trip short because I got so lonely at the end I just wanted to be home? I preface the article with this because while this is supposed to be a professional series of articles, we’re all human, and normalizing being human I think makes us all better and more understanding.
As a result, these articles are always going to try and strike that perfect balance, but I do know that I’m going to end up leaning more one way or another depending on the topic at hand. This one might end up being a bit more personal because for starters, waking up Friday the 9th for the first day of my trip, I truly was overwhelmed with anxiety.
Starting the Journey
I didn’t sleep well and I honestly hadn’t slept much at all. The project I’d been working on, a set of magnetic mosquito nets for my car, ended up having to be put together with painter's tape and prayers because my sewing machine stopped working the night before after all of the shops were closed. It was also raining when I was loading my car. This may not seem like that big of a deal, but starting this journey with a series of things not working out exactly how I planned, caused me to question whether or not I’d be able to handle all of the unexpected things that I was sure to come up.
Given that I have an almost six-year-old, I’m used to things not going as planned. Building flexibility into a schedule and having a vague idea of what I’d like to do during the day is usually the best that I can hope for, but for some reason, that learning did not seem to translate over into my solo trip planning. Please see the calendar below that shows what I had planned versus what happened. Needless to say, I learned a lot about flexibility with my schedule and my working environment on this trip.
I hadn’t intended on taking any time off to make this adventure happen, but to make it from Houston, Texas to Midland, Michigan while working, and also stopping to see friends in Lexington and Cincinnati on the way, I had to change where I was starting.
As a result of the change needed, I took Friday the 9th off and planned on spending it driving to Atlanta. However, given how I felt when I woke up that morning, I seriously considered telling everyone that I was on a trip, but instead, I'd just stay home and use virtual backgrounds. After all, people use those all the time even though they’re at home. No one would ever have to know where I was or wasn't in this scenario.
The idea of quitting before things started isn’t my jam. There’s the part of your mind known as the lizard brain that lets you know when a situation isn’t right even though your frontal cortex can’t suss out what is causing the uneasiness, but I knew this wasn’t that. You should listen to the lizard part of your brain, you shouldn’t listen to the anxiety. So I tucked my anxiety at home, finished packing up my car, and hit the road.
On a normal day, the drive from Houston to Atlanta should take 12-13 hours. I was fully expecting this and it is partially the reason I took the day off. What I wasn’t expecting was that the rain was going to follow me all day long and I would encounter not 1, not 2, but 5 different traffic accidents that I had to sit through.
What should have taken, at most, 13 hours had I taken my time at rest stops, took me closer to 16 hours. On top of that, when I arrived in Atlanta, the hotel reservations I’d made through a third-party app were canceled. It was one of those moments that you just have to laugh at the absurdity of it all. I had already pushed myself to the limits just getting to the city. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to do if they were unable to find me a room but I couldn’t help but think, “Yes, of course, this happened. What else? Anyone?”
But they found me a room and I brought all of the things in my car up to the room, recorded a video recapping the absurdity of the day, and passed out.
The next couple of days in Georgia were thankfully lovely and uneventful. I stumbled across a farmers market in Atlanta, got to see the Picasso-Calder exhibit at the High Museum of Art, got to go hiking to a beautiful waterfall, and took a majestic drive off the main highway through the mountains between Atlanta and Knoxville.
Getting to Work - Desk Set-Ups
The first desk I set up wasn’t until I was at my Airbnb in Knoxville on Sunday night and it honestly wasn’t one that I ended up using fairly often. I also set it up on Sunday night because I wanted to wake up Monday morning and get straight to work. I was excited to start working remotely. The relaxing weekend put my head back into the game and eased a lot of my travel worries. I was tentatively optimistic about the rest of my journey.
This setup below was used a few times on my journey and almost always when I was going to be in a location for the entirety of the day, such as here when I was in Knoxville, and another time when I was at a friend’s house in Lexington.
I did not want to be solely working on my 13.3” laptop screen. I’d planned to have two monitors so that I could multitask effectively (i.e. keep zoom meeting windows open on one while I was working in Excel or Powerpoint on the other). I also have a mouse so I could navigate between all of my windows and an external keyboard so I could put the screens next to each other so I wouldn’t have to keep turning my head to see all of the content.
Though it’s not the best for an extended period (i.e. multiple weeks), if you need to get a lot of work done and you’re not at your home desk, this is a fairly decent setup. Your content is presented in front of you so don’t have to turn your head as much and your arms and hands are in a much more natural position as you transition from navigating on-screen and typing. If you’re going to be working at that desk for a few days, I would recommend this setup.
This setup is not, however, the best for ergonomics. The ideal ergonomic setup means that your eyes are straight ahead and your elbows at a 90-degree angle. I modified this setup in subsequent trips, as seen on the right, but it wasn’t something I fully understood during this first trip. I’m a short person (a few hairs shy of 5’3) and finding a desk and chair with the proper height is virtually impossible. This is again one of those things that I was expecting, but the added combination of having to also have my arms and neck at an awkward angle was not something I had thought to consider.
The next day, and for the majority of the trip afterward, I didn’t bring out my accessories. I had planned on working in coffee shops and traveling to different locations between meetings, but none of these coffee shops, nor the majority of these cities, were my intended destinations. Therefore I wouldn’t be setting up at any of them for an extended period.*
*This seems like a crazy idea now that I’m much busier at work and I need that time between meetings to like… do work, but I took this trip during my first few months in a new role so I was primarily just listening and learning in these meetings.
As a result of this decision to change places often, I opted not to bring out the full setup I’d put together in Knoxville. Having to unplug everything and move locations would not only add to the time I needed to transition from location to location, but I also felt a bit weird asking someone to watch it while I went to the restroom. It’s one thing leaving your laptop and asking someone to watch it, it’s a whole separate thing to ask them to watch an entire desk set up with multiple accessories.
That optimism I experience the first day of working remotely and the next morning at the first coffee shop was short-lived because I’d forgotten about one important fact about traveling, the connection is difficult when you’re on the road, both in terms of signal and social aspects. I’ll cover a bit more about that next week.
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