This post is part 2 of a pair of before and after posts about my workspace environment. Part 1 was posted Friday.

After talking about the pros and cons of the workspace at my last job, let’s take a look at the place I sit down to work every day now that I’m my own boss.

Here’s my new desk space:

It’s smaller and simpler than my desk at the old job, that’s for sure. No wandering plant climbing all over, no electronics tools, and only one lava lamp. This is partly due to the fact that web-based work requires far fewer tools than electrical engineering, but it’s also due to the fact that since the desk is in our home, I can’t really go crazy decking it out like I could with a desk that I don’t live with.

I’ve still got all the essentials, including a nicer monitor with a higher resolution (1600×1200 vs. 1280×1024 at the old job), and a blazing-fast internet connection (faster than the old job, if you can believe it).

To complete the comparison with my old workspace, here’s a wider shot of my new office space:

As you can see, my home office is not really an office, but actually sits in the living room (of course, if you saw the King 5 report featuring Seattle Bubble, you already knew this). This of course can sometimes lead to distractions, but since my wife and I don’t really watch much television, it’s really not much different than an office. Our nice surround-sound system sits in the cabinet next to the desk, which means I can listen to music all day long, to my heart’s content. I can also plug in the headphones if I really need to escape the occasional distractions that can happen when working with an at home wife and two apparently love-starved dogs.

The nice thing about the new workspace is that if I need quiet, I just turn off the music and put the dogs outside. If I want music, I crank it up. Obviously being at home means being around a lot of potential distractions: video games, pets, movies, etc… Fortunately I’ve been able to focus on getting work done, with only the occasional interlude to read some random news or comics on the internet (which could arguably be considered actually part of my job now…).

I think the biggest benefit of the new workspace is not having a ton of ringing phones and cross-talk going on all around me. When I need to concentrate, I can have just me, the computer, and the music. Someday down the road it would be nice to have a dedicated office, but the current setup is working pretty well so far.