How (Busy) Software Engineers/Scientists Use Their Computers - A Datapoint

Having spent a few years doing HCI research, I know very well the importance and value that getting data points (any data points at all) about how people set up their workspaces and organise their work/workspaces is - especially for anyone involved in Operating System UX, Personal Information Management (PIM), File Systems, or Web Browser UX work.

Today, I thought I'd make a quick post outlining my personal workflow, in the hopes that this will be a useful datapoint for anyone out there designing these systems (*wink wink* Microsoft ;).  Admittedly, the way I work is probably a bit of an outlier, but I there are many elements here that should be of general value. Hopefully this will be of use to some people out there who study this stuff :)

So, without further ado, here is an overview of my typical working environment.

Office Workspace Setup

As promised, here's a separate post with some snaps of what my new office workspace setup looks like. Unfortunately, these were just quickies snapped using my el-crappo phone, since it's a bit of a burden trying to lug both my camera AND a laptop along (though as you'll see, there are ample reasons to consider doing this sometime).