You Are Your Workspace
The stuff on your desk affects the ideas you come up with, now more than ever
Every time I interview someone for a story, I spend half the interview not looking at their face. Instead, I look around them, surreptitiously collecting data from the objects in their workspace. I did this before Zoom, in real life, and now I do it through our little internet windows into each other’s homes. The office of a scientist has awards all over the floor, or a teddy bear on a shelf. A teenager works on a tablet with a purple detachable keyboard. A police administrator, for some reason, has a nametag written on notebook paper.
Inevitably, these items reveal facets of the interviewee’s life that you’d miss if you focused only on words or clothes. Awards all over the floor, for example, might convey that a person is so busy achieving excellence he doesn’t have time to enjoy the spoils. A teddy bear might indicate an emotional connection to a child (that particular interviewee was a doctor who treated young people with cancer). Desk items are never just there. A person put them there, and if you pay close enough attention, you might be able to figure out why.
Since the pandemic drove the majority of American white-collar workers from productivity-optimized offices into slapdash living room arrangements, our stress…
