Two Desks

I’ve got two desks at the moment, and most days I sit at both of them (not real desks, more two ways of sitting down to work).

One belongs to the day job, where I’m Product Owner for our User Portal at Yorizon. That’s where the calendar lives, and the meetings, and the mails I try to read twice before they go out.

The other one is mine, for CDiT. Fimme stretches out across my feet while I work; Sien curls up on the rug behind me. Through the window it’s Brandenburg, green and wide, an hour east of Berlin.

For a long time I assumed I’d have to choose. That’s the story you hear everywhere: years at the company desk, then one day you clear it out and go independent, with a post about it. I didn’t do that, and I’m not planning to. I do the day job, I run my own company next to it, and there’s a house in Brandenburg that wants its share as well (the garden has no opinion on either desk, it just grows).

The work at both desks is more alike than I expected. Product work, architecture conversations, the messy middle of building something real people will use. The difference is how much of it I get to shape. At my own desk the problems are mine, and so are the decisions and the order I do things in on a Tuesday afternoon. At the day job I’m one voice of several, which has its own comfort; somebody else carries part of the weight.

Holding both is harder than either one alone. Some mornings I catch myself at the wrong desk in the wrong posture - the slight hunch, checking mail out of reflex, working to be seen rather than to get something done. And some evenings the company desk eats hours that were meant for someone else. Setting the company up was its own adventure (German tax law came close to winning), but keeping two desks honest week after week turns out to be the actual work.

What helps is noticing which desk I’m at. When I sit down for CDiT, my head goes somewhere else. I didn’t plan that; it grew on its own.

I don’t know yet if it stays like this. Most weeks it works. Some weeks one desk swallows the other, and I notice later than I’d like… I’m getting a bit faster at noticing, though.