612 The Accountant Desk Setup: A Guide [10 tips to dial in your battle station]

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Today we are covering all four corners of the office, from your furniture to your computer to your monitor to your peripherals to that stinky old chair that you're still sitting in while your back is screaming out for help. We're going through the Ten Commandments of an accountant's desk setup, how to get that battle station tippy top. All right. You know, mattress companies are like, you're going to spend 47 years of your life sleeping, so invest in a big mattress. If you're an accountant, you're going to spend more time accounting than you will probably spend sleeping in your life. All right. So let's start treating that battle station the way it ought to be treated. We're going to cover a lot of ground today from best practices for your monitor to your desk, cable management, lighting. And this is not just— this is not just office candy. This is setting it up for productivity. This stuff matters. Okay, enough of the intro. Let's get into it. How do you do, fellow accountants? My name is Jason Staats. Welcome to the Jason on Firms podcast, where we talk all things accounting firm strategy. But today, the strategy that we often overlook is the environment in which we turn up to work. There are right ways to do this. There are wrong ways to do this. I worked in offices earlier in my career that were shaving huge percentages off my productivity. Like, I'm pretty sure I can actually measure that now with what I know. And if you're, if you're triggered from how I just said I said major, that's your problem. Somebody literally brought this up to me in person the other day, the way I say major. Anyways, let's get down to business. The 10 Commandments of an accountant's desk setup, or more broadly, office setup, and then a game of hot or not, running through some office furniture trends right now and breaking down if they are all they are stacked up to be. If you're on my email newsletter, a couple weeks back I sent out these 10 Commandments. If you're not on my newsletter yet, what are you doing? Jasononfirms.com/newsletter. It is a weekly little digest of the most can't-miss stuff that we're doing. Let's get into this though with commandment number 1, thou shalt know thy limits. This might be the commandment that is most flagrantly being violated by accountants all over the world. More does not mean better. Okay? More monitors, more inches on the monitor, more desk. More is rarely the solution. In fact, more usually invites the opposite of what you want, like distraction. I remember my first office envy was a big L-shaped Formica-covered desk in the first office I worked in. Actually, the second office I worked in. There were about 35 offices and we had two types of desks. There was a basic one that was just a straight line. What is that called? Does that have a name? I don't know. A desk without a return. And then there were these big old monsters, these L-shaped things. This was like 2010s, but these desks were maybe from the '80s or '90s. Like these were the sort of desks that are almost built into an office, built into a building. They are so heavy and hard to move. But you know what I didn't have? I didn't have the L-shaped desk and the people with the L-shaped desk had so much more room for activities than I did. Like they've got this whole side thing. Like, what could I be using that for? Until one day I became that guy and I had that L-shaped desk. And you know what? The grass wasn't any greener over there because you know what I put on that? I can, I can still remember. I would put empty little Tupperwares from my lunch. I would put the plastic, like grocery bag that I brought my lunch in to work. I would put junk on that return and all it did was visually Clutter my office. What was once nothing, 'cause there was no return there, became a collector for all sorts of stuff that ought to be tucked away somewhere. And in that era, we still had a bunch of paper files. So over time, it just started sprouting files and they would pile up and just get bigger and bigger. We do this with our desks. And maybe that's just one of those unlearnable lessons, you know, where you always, you aspire, you envy your neighbor's desk. And it's not until you get there and you look around and you see, oh, this, I'm not any happier here, that you can actually reel it back. Maybe that is an unlearnable lesson. But the other place where people take this way too far is their monitors. Let's cool it. Okay. We've got now gone through the whole evolution from 1 monitors to 2 monitors to 3 and 4 monitors. Some people took it even further than that to 6 to 8 monitors. Better be divisible by 2 after 4, but then People were like, oh no, no, no, no, I found the option. Just insane, ultra-wide, humongous display. After that, it became, oh, just like a TV. I'm just going to use a TV as my monitor. So you got people that are like, well, I got a 49-inch OLED. I use that as my monitor. Everyone is trying to out-overdo everyone else when, buddy, we are all doing the same work. You're staring at QuickBooks on this screen, you're staring at another thing on this screen, you got your tax software up over here. You got the tax docs up right here. I know what you're doing with all that extra space, and I know it's not work, or it's not stuff that ought to be on the screen. You're parking your Outlook, you're parking Twitter, you're parking MSNBC. Think of the monitor as the desk of the mind. Oh, hang on. We might, we might be onto something here. If the monitor is the desk of the mind, then the more desk surface area you have, the more monitor surface area you have, the more we are inviting clutter. And it is hard enough for us to focus on anything these days. The last thing you need are all these different apps yelling out at you as you try to focus on one thing you're actually trying to get done. I actually think that is a tremendous metaphor. Okay, commandment number 2, thou shalt put wheels under thy desk. And if you haven't experienced this before, you have not yet experienced true freedom because sitting sedentary for 8 to 12 hours a day does not lend one's body to sudden bouts of, uh, let's say super strength. You gotta move a desk, something like that. Your body has not been doing a thing for hours, and you think all of a sudden you're gonna power clean this big heavy thing? This might be the leading cause of office injuries. I'm just speculating here, I don't have data on this. Just trying to scooch a desk or trying to reach around a desk to grab a cable or something like that. I once had a coworker, the guy was a college football quarterback, actually took the team to the national championship. And when he was working at a desk right behind me, I don't know if he actually slipped a disc in his neck, but he had a very severe injury while raising a forkload of salad to his mouth. Just went down in a heap. This guy was a stud, more of an athlete than I will ever be. But that is what accounting will do to you so, so fast. And I mean, there's certain things we can only fight back against that so much. But one of the really logical ways to fight back against that is to put that desk on wheels, buddy. Next time you gotta move it somewhere, next time you gotta get behind it 'cause your muffin rolled back there, don't lift the desk up. Just give it a little roll 'cause it's on wheels now. Now, don't go cheap here. Don't go itty-bitty baby casters where it's gonna get like stuck on a peanut or a little USB cable. You want some big chunky casters. Like the bigger the wheels, the better. But I can almost guarantee you at some point in your life, this will save you an injury and just give you a greater sense of freedom. Not that you're going to take off with your desk one day. It's more about the fact that you know that you could. All right. Commandment number 3, thou shalt mount unto thine underside. That doesn't make sense. The underside of your desk. So most accountants are still only utilizing 50% of the surface area of their desk. Think about that. You're only utilizing 50% of the surface area of your desk. That is the top half of your desk. What about the bottom half? Go ahead, take a look right now. Stick your head down there. Is the bottom half getting as much use as the top half? I would hazard a guess no, but that is a whole upside down of possibility where you can mount all sorts of things. You can mount a holder for your entire computer. That's what I would do. I had like a tower mount and we had those attached to the underside of every desk. So the computer, the workstation itself was attached to the underside of the desk there. Obviously we got a laptop that's super easy. I would also attach the UPS, so the battery backup, it would be right there as well. I was a big hook guy. I'd always have a few hooks on the other side so you could hang like a lunch bag, or if you're bringing a purse to work, you can hang a purse there. I'd often perch a banana on that hook. Uh, headphones. I would have headphones on that hook as well. Everything that you can put to the underside of your desk is now something that doesn't have to be on the upper side of your desk or somewhere else. It is a huge untapped opportunity for most, and you are a cordless drill and a little bit of hardware away from having a more organized desk. Uh, the magic of pairing this with casters is if your computer, the battery backup, if everything is attached to your desk, literally the only thing you got trailing off that desk is a power cable and maybe a network cord if you're not working off Wi-Fi. That's it. You got to take that desk on the road. You unplug from power and that whole thing becomes mobile. As I read this ad, I am feasting my eyes upon talented accountants that you could literally, literally book an interview with right now. Like Ruru, a CPA, a tax pro, $3,500 a month. He's got experience with CCH Access, bless your heart, CCH Engagement, QuickBooks Online. Gang, he is one of many accounting pros that you can peruse at the Cloud Accountant Staffing portal. We'll link it down in the show notes. It is a veritable smorgasbord of accounting talent, folks that they have pre-vetted, where you can go in, you can see, see their experience. You can literally see an intro video that they've recorded, and you can book an interview with them without ever even having to hop on a call with Cloud Accountant Staffing. Amazing. We got tax pros, bookkeepers, auditors, executive assistants. Oh my gosh, I got a lot of people in here right now. 45 candidates. Because I know you need that next dream hire. You really do. What do you got to lose? Okay, go check out the portal, book an interview. Feels like a win-win, right? You're only going to move forward if you find somebody you love. Cloud Accountant Staffing, run by folks that used to run an accounting firm, they make it as easy as possible for you. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. Hey, if you're done licking your wounds from tax season, if you run more than a few hundred 1040s a year, you got to look at this episode sponsor, Sorban. One of my leaders in tax workflow automation can save you a tremendous amount of time right now, specifically on the intake part of 1040 workflows, but they're also working on connecting to your tax software automatically, like pushing data in there. They're working on automating the delivery of the tax return, but this is like the fastest growing category in tax tech. If you're a US tax firm, you absolutely need to have a good tax workflow solution nailed down. We did about 1,800 1040s a year in my accounting firm. This would have saved us so much chasing clients for documents and just tedious organizing of all these PDFs. Oh my gosh, can't say enough about Sortman. We actually did a full demo of their platform on my YouTube channel not so long ago if you want to see it. But to learn more about Sortman, check out the link down in the show notes. Now, really important variable here, I won't hammer on this too much because we bring it up on the podcast a lot, is number 4, thou shalt suspend thy monitor on arms. Not that flimsy little stand that the monitor comes on that's like adjustable an inch and a half up and down, but truly a monitor arm, a monitor arm that clamps to the edge of your desk. And don't go cheap here. Amazon will try to just give you the worst, lightest weight slop. You don't want that. Go big here. Like, you can buy a monitor arm for life. I go Ergotron, okay? I don't mean to flex. Things are going pretty well. But I did this back in my accounting firm too. I bought Ergotrons. These are, I'm pretty sure these are like the same arms that, ugh, what do they call the people that scan pregnant ladies' tummies. Pretty sure these are the same kind of arms on those little, uh, freestanding display things that they roll over when they're greasing up a tummy for an ultrasound. Never mind, we're talking medical-grade stuff here. The power of having your monitor on an arm is one, you save the space of the monitor stand underneath the monitor, so now under the monitor is totally usable desk space. But also you have got full 360 degrees of flexibility here on where you need to position your monitor. And this is actually very important for our alertness. This brings me to commandment number 5, thou shalt lift thine eyes. Studies actually show that looking downward will make you more tired. And this comes from like evolutionarily, the sky was up, the blue sky. You know, we've talked about, we've heard about blue light, how that wakes us up and makes us alert because the sky is blue. Well, it turns out looking upward also has the effect of waking you up. And I'm not talking about anything extreme here. If you think about, just a straight out horizontal plane from your eyes, having the monitor just a touch above that will actually make you more alert throughout your workday. But most people do the opposite because the built-in stand that comes with your monitor generally can't get the monitor high enough, but also then the monitor will like tilt back. And so we have the monitor below eyeline tilting up towards us, which is the worst thing for our body's alertness. What we want is the opposite, something that is slightly above eyeline. You don't know how much money that tip could make you. 2% more productive, that's what we all just got. Commandment number 6, thou shalt manage thy cords. Okay, lot of different approaches to cable management. There are so many different little cable bundles and your little Velcro zip ties, all these different ways to manage cables. Let me tell you the right way to do it and the wrong way to do it. The wrong way to do it that a lot of people pride themselves in is they've got this little under-desk sort of wiry rack thing And they just, they like tightly wrap the cables all around this rack and it looks so nice and neat and orderly. It is like, it's like a little, a little loom under their desk and they're like weaving their cables around it just so. And that's great once you've got it done and you've taken the time to do it. The problem is as soon as you have to change anything, then you have to like unwind that whole mess and it's just not flexible for the next thing you got to plug in or unplug. and it ends up never quite being as good as it was when you first set it up. So what do you do? The happy medium, in my opinion, it is actually a privacy shield. So privacy shield being the thing that will hang down from the front of your monitor, and this is for like someone that's coming to work wearing a skirt or something like that. Like that's where these privacy shields originally come from. You have this, this deal that hangs down off the front of your desk. It's attached just like to the underside of the desk and hangs down in the front. but most of them have like a kangaroo pouch on the inside of them. This is the best way I've found to manage cables, hands down. All the under desk mounted stuff, it just locks down my cables too much. It is too constricting. What I am fully bought into instead is this privacy shield on the front edge of your desk and all the cables hang down in like the kangaroo pouch of that privacy shield. It keeps all those cords held in there, but they're all totally loose. So changing things, totally fine. I will say it leads to an 8 out of 10 under desk experience. I would say this yields an 8 out of 10 under desk visual display. You can do 10 out of 10 and like nice and tightly wrap all these cords around everything. The problem is it's just a monster to maintain. And anytime you change anything, it's just a headache. But don't be the person that just doesn't even think about cable management at all. All right. Everybody hates that guy. Don't be that guy. Commandment number 7, thou shalt not roll the awful free Dell keyboard and mouse. I think this is still a thing, like this mouse and keyboard that gets bundled with the computer that you just order from Dell. Oh, I mean, it should go without saying, the thing that they bundle in for free, like that's not going to be the move. Sure, that is not as good as it gets. In what other situation in life Would somebody bundle something in for free and you'd be like, okay, yeah, I'll just roll with this. No, you're going to be like, ooh, what? Really? This is free. Are you sure this will do the job? Answer is no, it won't. Your peripherals, your mouse and keyboard, that is the link between man and machine. Don't leave that to the cheap bargain bin, just throwaway option just because it's there. You're better than that. Okay. Now I have long been a keyboard maxer, a real nerd on all things keyboardery. And I mean, this is very straightforward. You're either a mechanical keyboard person or you aren't yet. Those are the two types of accountants. And I take a lot of shots for being mechanical keyboard guy. People still make fun of that in 2026 when accountants, let's not forget, we are the adding machine people who will pridefully hammer on an adding machine just making such a commotion. And we're like, oh, this makes me feel alive. That's a mechanical keyboard. But then that same person will turn 30 degrees to the left and start dopplin' away on this little membrane Dell keyboard. Like, what, how is that, what? Do you not see the gap in that logic? Now, there are mechanical keyboards of all noisiness levels. You can get very quiet mechanical keyboards. You can get very loud ones. What it is about is the feel, the experience. The big thock energy, the little kickback you get on your fingers when you're typing, it is very satisfying. It's not unlike an adding machine. Like, the reason why adding machines are satisfying is the mechanical keys. Wouldn't you love that on your normal keyboard? You would, okay? I know you would. Now the mouse, the mouse is, I mean, that's, that is beyond the scope of this podcast. There are so many flavors of this and it is in many ways kind of a reflection of the person, but I can tell you what you're not is basic. So stop using the free Dell mouse that comes with that stinky Dell keyboard. Okay, commandment number 8, thou shalt standardize thy teams hardware. All right. What I don't want you to be is the guy that walks through Costco on a Saturday and is like, oh my gosh, that's a— that computer monitor looks pretty good. Whoa, that's only— that's only $220. Let me get 12 of these for the office. Please don't do that. Okay. What you're creating is an absolute mess. And this is a very hard thing for like the accountant psyche to resist because we are— I mean, cheap stuff at Costco, that is so up our wheelhouse, right? The trouble is time is money and like the bargain bin, uh, sort of throwaway stuff that you get at Costco usually comes back to bite you one way or another, like when it bricks or when the warranty isn't very good or something like that. The gear I'm using for my team needs to be universal, same laptop, same dock, like so I can swap that stuff in and out. One goes down, I got another one sitting on the shelf, especially if you're fussing with laptop stuff like docks. And monitor support is so annoying, just how fiddly all that stuff is, especially in PC stuff. The last thing you need is everyone having something slightly different so you don't quite know what's going to work and what's not going to work, right? Even if it means spending a little extra money, standardize the setup. It will make your life so much easier. Hey, I know you love Cloud Cowork as much as I do, but have you heard the news about Canopy? Coworker Subtle is a new AI assistant they launched inside of Canopy, one of this episode's sponsors. Canopy, a practice management system that is a feature nerd's dream. They're trying to cover as much of everything you need in an accounting firm in a single place. But as we talk about on this podcast often, it is much easier to roll out an AI agent inside of a closed system than it is to roll out an AI agent that works across like all of my systems, right? That's the trade-off. I want the AI that works across all my systems, but we're struggling now with like, what's the most secure way to do that? The AI agent that works inside my all-in-one system? Buddy, that is easy. Flip the switch, count me in. Strap in, buckle up, I want it. Canopy is so convinced that you're going to love what they got to show you, they're going to cut you a check for 75 big ones. They'll give you a $75 gift card. Gift card to Bed Bath Beyond. What's that? Okay. I'm not sure where, where the gift card is for, but if you book a demo with Canopy via getcanopy.com/Jason, I'll put that link down in the show notes. They give you a $75 gift card just for coming and, and demoing. Do it. What do you got to lose? Hey, real quick, the most important question accounting firms are asking right now in 2026 is how do I use AI securely in my production workflows? I've said this many times, don't take security advice from a YouTuber. What you need is actual like proper IT help, like this episode sponsor, Farodil. If I had to shoot from the hip, uh, with what I've seen from folks, Farodil might be the fastest growing IT solution for small accounting firms. I say small, I mean that like 100 employees and under. You need an IT group that just works with accounting professionals, otherwise you are paying this IT group to learn accounting firm things. Like I had a local IT guy that I once brought over and spent 2 days watching him learn CCH engagement, like how the, like, database worked on my server. Oh my gosh, please don't do that. Work with an IT group that only supports accounting firms, particularly right now as it is so important that we are beginning to implement AI effectively inside of our firms. You want to do that responsibly too, right? You need better help with this stuff? Look no further than Verito. They do hosting, they'll be your entire IT group, they'll do your WISP. Can't recommend them enough. Check out the link down in the show notes to learn more. Commandment number 9: Thou shalt invest in the things in which thou art glued for 12 hours a day. All right. It is okay to spend money on your battle station. I am talking like a solid wood desktop, a higher quality monitor. Think of the number of hours a day your eyeballs spend staring at a monitor. And then we're like, mm, I'll spend $200, but not $280 on a monitor. Please. You're worth it. Oh, especially chairs. Don't get me started on chairs, man. We got enough. Working against us as accountants in this sedentary lifestyle to then choose a chair that won't give those accountant curves of yours what they need. If I go back to that office I worked at, I came to it as an intern. So you had like 35 offices in this building. And my first day I come and I sit down in a chair and it had two armrests, an armrest on either side, and I leaned on one and the entire armrest but like armrest and chair back assembly just like fell off to the side just with the slightest bit of pressure. And then I let go of it and it snaps back up to like upright. When someone that was much more senior than me got a new chair and then that chair went to the next person and then like 11 people down the line, I then got the second worst chair. This stuff is no joke, people. I'm 37 years old now and I feel like I'm just now realizing the damage that accounting has done to my body. When I try to do things like, you know, touch my toes, turn my head, I got a lot of weird neck stuff going on now. And all of a sudden you're like, geez, I got to care about this and I got to stretch for how many minutes every morning? If we're going to subject our bodies to all this desk time, don't be afraid to treat yourself. Okay. Last one. Commandment number 10, thou shalt honor the light and watch thy CO2. Okay. Light has a huge impact on mood, on like your circadian rhythm and all that stuff. If you plug into like Huberman at all, Working in the dark like that, it will make your body tired. Working in bright light, it will wake your body up. A dingy office, a kind of darker office like that will impact your energy levels. In a perfect world, you can position your desk like near a window because ideally our body cycle is kind of matching the outdoor cycle. Like that is kind of the best, best case scenario. In reality, like with our schedules, it's not always realistic. I'm up before the sun is up now. I got kids. That's the only time I can I can just be left alone, but especially first thing in the morning, like getting bright light, even if it's artificial light, that will help to wake you up. But definitely a thing worth paying attention to is your office environment. How well lit is it while you're trying to do stuff? That will impact your energy levels. The other thing we've talked about on the podcast before, but something that I think most people are still totally blind to, is the CO2 level in your office. This is a very real thing in the US. Osha has said that CO2 levels over 1,000 parts per million in a room will make you groggy, will genuinely make you less productive. And there's 5 rooms that since college I've spent most of my time doing work in, 5 rooms in various offices and houses and all that, 5 rooms. 3 of those 5 rooms, the default kind of average CO2 level in that room was over 1,000 parts per per million. The first office I worked in, the entire building was over this and it literally like starves your brain of what it needs to be at its sort of peak performance. And so during COVID these CO2 monitors, which are just little things you can buy on Amazon, got incredibly popular. But importantly, with just a couple changes to your kind of work setup, you can improve your CO2 level. So even in this room that I'm in right now, I found that the central air, I need to set the fan to auto, otherwise CO2 levels get too high. The last house I had, if I was working out of the home, I had to like open the window every 3 or 4 hours, otherwise CO2 levels would get too high. But I've worked in entire buildings full of people where they were being impacted by this, and collectively it absolutely makes a difference. Okay, there are your 10 commandments. Tell me, do you have an 11th? Pop a comment down below. What did I miss? But now we're going to play a game of Hot or Not. Hot or not. We're breaking down the latest in office furniture, computer stuff, and lighting. Let's play Hot or Not. The game is called Hot or Not, where we unpack office trends and decide, is that a hot trend or not? First up, standing desks. I feel like we have come off the standing desk wave. Like for a while people are like, oh my gosh, You can stand up and work instead of just sitting down and work. And then people are like, oh, this is perfect because sitting was the new smoking. And then like a year later, people are like, whoa, standing's the new smoking. It turns out I can tell you for me, standing desks still hot. And the reason is not to let me stand while I work because nobody that has a standing desk actually does that. But why I most appreciate standing desks is so that I can dial in the ergonomics, right? Like have the desk at the level that I need at the chair level where I want it, rather than having to build an entire plan around whatever the desk's height is. The desk can finally meet me where I'm at. I will very occasionally stand, but for me, the stronger argument for a standing desk is to get the surface of the desk right where you want it. Number 2, standing mats. If you got into standing desks when I did, when they were kind of like peak excitement, a lot of these came with these little rubber standing mats. And it was like, hey, you can be doing a lot of standing now. This will make it easier for you to stand. But the trouble with that little doormat is it was always in the way. And I try to roll my chair back in and you've got the little doormat there and they got to find a place for this doormat. I'm going to go with not on this one because if standing is hard, I think it's a shoe issue, not a mat issue. You know, if you can't stand at your desk, maybe we need to start asking some questions of your shoes because it's a tough world out there. Like there's not a, there isn't standing mats. You're not going to lily pad across standing mats through your entire day. Oh, you ever seen the TV show Community? There's one bit where a character was having like this moment of introspection and he was like, why don't they just make tires out of roads? And then you could drive anywhere. I think that's kind of what I'm getting at here is the solution isn't the stand mat. The solution is to have stand mat shoes so they're comfortable to stand on whether you're at your desk or not. Dropping some real bombs today. Number 3, Gaming chairs. Okay. Gaming chairs, hot or not? This is a spicy one. I'm gonna give this to you straight. As a gaming chair owner, it is not hot to have a gaming chair in your accounting firm. All right? There's just something about seeing that on a video meeting, the big, like the big kind of chair going over the person's head where you're like, listen, like you're young, you got like, we get it, but that doesn't make a gaming chair okay. Now there's a really big spectrum of gaming chairs from like the real nerdy, bright colorful ones to what I've got, which is a much more tasteful sort of neutral toned one. But I don't know, am I a boomer? And I say that with full respect, boomers. I don't feel like gaming chairs belong in the office. And I've been, I feel like I've been pretty progressive on chairs in my life. In college, I had one of those, uh, it was like one of those sort of rocking chairs that sit on the ground. Like remember the gaming chairs that would like rock all the way back? I had one of those. Right now I currently own, uh, the Secretlab XL gaming chair, which as far as gaming chairs go, Secret Labs is the best. I'm realizing now it's going to sound like a flex. And then I have a Herman Miller Aeron because that is still my favorite Herman Miller chair. And I like being able to have, you know, business mode. But then you got the gaming chair like the how do you do, how do you do fellow kids mode. I shouldn't have, I shouldn't have shared that. That's right. Number 4. I know people who will die by this one. Number 4 is a kneeling chair or saddle stool. Chairs. Have gotten very complex. There are some chairs where you literally just, you kneel on it. It is what it sounds like. It's a little holster for your knee. Because if both sitting and standing are the new smoking, then we got to find something that is neither. Also saddle stool. A saddle stool. I mean, it's almost like a bike seat. Like you sit on it and the thing will lean back and forth. I'm going with hot in a specific context. I'm going to say hot if I can share this with some of my colleagues, because to me it doesn't rise to the level of a thing that I'm just going to have sitting in a room by myself. But I do love these kind of chairs and would love to mount up from time to time if I need a change of pace. I'm actually a big— I'm a big stool guy, and that's a statement we don't need clipped out of context. But what I do enjoy is a standing desk, like raising it up actually between standing height and sitting height and then like sitting and working at a stool. I actually really enjoy that. Somehow it like takes some of the weight off your back and just kind of changes things up a bit. But I don't, I mean, I don't want to like a whole garage of different furniture lined up next to my desk depending on what mood I'm in, right? So kneeling chair/saddle stool, I'm going to say hot, but only in an office environment where I can share it with others. Number 5, glass desktop. Actually, the desk I'm shooting this on right now is actually a whiteboard desk, which technically is a version of a glass desktop. I feel like these were hot for a while, but I'm gonna go with not. And the reason is they're just so gosh darn cold. Like they do not feel natural in the way that wood does. Like my skin touches them in the morning and I'm like, ugh. I want to be welcomed. I don't wanna have to warm you up with my body heat in order to be comfortable. No, no, no, no. Meet me halfway. I feel like solid wood desktops, I say that, they're probably just like wood veneers, That's not true. A solid wood desktop. That has the best feel to me. For Micah, I don't know. You know, 1995 called. They said it's time for an upgrade. So I'm not a glass desktop guy. I think the current version of this is probably the metal desktop because Secret Labs, go back to Secret Labs. This is a company that does office furniture. This is probably the biggest, most like flex on your friends desk that's out there. But they have this just monstrosity of a metal desk that has like a whole ecosystem of all these magnetic attachments. And stuff, and it is very cool, but it's metal, and metal is equally unforgiving to the body heat of my arms, and so I'm a solid wood desktop guy. Number 6, L-shaped desk with the return. I'd done this one a little bit earlier in the episode. I'm not a big L-shaped desk guy. I mean, I am a— what would that be? I'm a lowercase L-shaped desk guy. I think if your desk has turned the corner, then you're asking too much of your desk and knickknacks and more stuff than we probably want to put on there. Last one here, number 7, the keyboard tray. Oh, the keyboard tray. I had keyboard tray people that I worked with. I think this was— why do people use keyboard trays? You want to know what I really think? I think people like the cozy feeling of that little, that little two-car hand garage. Just having a nice little place to keep your hands. I don't think— is there? I mean, this feels like ergonomic signaling. Does it make that big of a difference? It was maybe a solution for a problem that standing desks have solved. Because if I have a standing desk, I can put the surface of the desk at any height that I want. If I have a monitor arm, then I can put the monitor at any height that I want to, right? And so what do I need the little keyboard tray for? Also, they're just so gosh darn flimsy. Every one of those, I, you just, you're bouncing all around on them. For me, that's not the move because I can get my desk to the right height that I want. I don't know. What is, is that a cold take? Is there a place for keyboard trays in, in what is it? 2026? That's a no for me, dog. Not a keyboard tray guy. Would love to hear your takes on office setup stuff or stuff that you want to throw into a future Hot or Not segment. Are you ultra-wide monitor guy? Are you giant TV monitor guy? Vertical mouse lady, is that you? Tell me. Build your case so that we can all grow smarter and more informed together. Doesn't mean I'm going to agree with it. I almost certainly won't, but I want to hear it anyways. Go out there and upgrade that setup, okay? You are worth it. Don't be afraid to build that battle station of your dreams, all right? Hey, I'll catch you in the next one.