You might be familiar with ‘What’s on my iphone ?’ videos and blog posts. This post is a similar one but here I talk about what’s on my desk ?

To begin with I have a decent desk with three drawers and two other compartments and a foot rest. Out of the three drawers one of them is a keyboard drawer, and since I use a laptop there isn’t a need for it and hence I use it to place a writing pad and some unused pages from my college notes. College notes usually do not get filled up entirely during the college year/semesters, so I tear apart these pages and keep it in the keyboard for some quick needs like jotting down a phone number or make a grocery list before heading to the grocery store or the supermarket.

This may sound a little old fashioned due to the presence of virtual assistants in today’s world. For example one could ask Siri to make the list on the Notes app or something similar. But the problem with it is not everyone could find it as a cakewalk, for example if a 72 year old granny isn’t tech savvy, she would probably find it easier to make the grocery list on a paper, rather than use virtual assistant or super expensive gadgets. The reason why I use paper over phone is that the validity of the grocery list is roughly around 20 mins, post that I mayn’t need it but if I make the list on a phone I should delete it once the task is done and there is also a chance of it getting synced with cloud and I don’t want it to happen.

The eco-friendly dudes mayn’t like the above paragraph…, moving on further I have a cup which I use as a pen stand. The regular pen stands look vague, so I use a cup which serves the purpose of a pen stand and also adds glam to the desk.

I’ve been a huge fan of writing instruments and I have plenty of them. My favourite ones are the fountain pens. It is December 2018 and some are taking notes on their tablets with cool styluses, so fountain pens, again sound a little old fashioned but they are just amazing and I like them. Moving on further I have a syringe which I use to fill ink. I also have glue, ink bottle and a torch adjacent to the pen stand a.k.a. cup.

Some of the books that I am not done reading lie on the desk and the pile is slowly growing. One of the reason for this growing pile is I end up buying books when my cart on Amazon doesn’t exceed INR 500. Post INR 500 there isn’t shipping charges, so for example if the value of the cart is somewhere close to 480 I buy books. The shipping charge at the time of writing this post is INR 40, so when I buy a book this amount gets deducted from the overall value of the cart or in other words I get INR 40 off on a book.

I also have a scientific calculator on my desk which I’m using quite a lot these days for calculating percentages and break even point. Most of these functions could be done on Microsoft Excel or Numbers but to do that I have to switch on my laptop or phone and open the right file on the application, which is a bit time consuming, so for swift calculations especially those that involves decimals and too many digits a calculator on the desk can come in handy.

There were plenty of applications on the App store that could do the aforementioned calculations but I didn’t like the user interface and handling of the applications, so I preferred the idea of having a calculator on the desk.

The drawers and the compartment shelter earpods and a gorilla pod respectively. I use the gorilla pod with a smartphone holder to shoot time lapses. It could also be used to hold the phone still while video calling, going live on Instagram or any other social media. The gorilla pod I use is Joby 3K, the reason I got

 

 

 

3K was it can hold decent amount of weight (3 kilograms), which means I can use the same gorilla pod for both my phone and camera.  There are gorilla pods with much lesser capacity (Joby 1K) but the problem with this is, it cannot be used to mount heavy cameras.

No plants : Recently I’ve seen many people having little plants in tiny pots on the desk. Having plants do add a different feel to the desk but I feel that the plants should be out in the sunlight and not under the influence of artificial lights from the laptops, monitors, bulbs etc. So I have the plants in the balcony, where it gets some real good sunlight and natural breeze.

Bye to the printer : The only reason I needed a printer was to print my examination admission tickets four times in an year and the printer was consuming desk real estate and needed periodic maintenance (removing dust, removing dried cartridges and installing new ones etc.). So I decided to let go off my printer. The solution for printing admission ticket was, I would get the admission ticket onto a usb stick and get it printed at a cyber centre. This is also cost effective. For example if the printer and its accessories costs INR 5000 and you let go off the printer and deposit the same money in bank, the bank pays you interest. Imagine the bank pays you an annual interest of 6% on INR 5000. The interest amount would be INR 300. And the cost for a black and white print of admission ticket is INR 2 per copy and INR 1 for Xerox at the time of writing this post. To be in a safer place it is good to have multiple copies of admission ticket just in case you lose one, so imagine you take 5 copies of admission ticket. The first copy is a print and the remaining are Xerox. That makes it INR 2+4 = INR 6. Four times an year = INR 24. INR 300 – INR 24 = INR 276. Which means I save INR 276 by ditching printer.

That is it from this post. See you next time with a different post. Have a great day 🙂