What I call fighting off the panic, Peter Norvig; "People get out of balance when they see their value as being able to respond quickly. If I see myself as a machine for answering email, then my work life would never stop because my email never stops. If instead I see my value as separating the important from the unimportant and making good decisions on the important, then I can go home at a reasonable hour, spend time with my family, ignore my email and phone messages all weekend long, and make sure that when I return to work, I am in the right mood to make the good decisions."

I steadfastly refuse to let a company panic me. If I do it means I work all weekend and end up sucking in other engineers into the panic. You usually find out a week later it wasn't that important and could have waited until monday. When we interview engineers I say, "Engineering doesn't work weekends, and when we do it is usually me that does, and before I do I make sure I am texted (not phone) and work it out if it is truly important or not." It means I am a jerk at times, but it works - and is necessary.

Simple Desks; a blog which shows photos of simple desk and work environment set ups people have. Largely it is dominated by the mac contingent. I suspect it is mainly designers submitting their desks to the website and they are 100% mac.

It is hard to fight off the chaos of paper that dominates the cube farm environment. I try and keep my desk to a bare minimum of ephemeristic clutter with varying amounts of success and failure. But my workspace is non-optimal.

I have two monitors but they are different resolutions, shapes and sizes. I have a laptop base that is locked to the cube wall with a lock and key - and I don't know the combination to it. The cube I am in used to be Cathryn's and she is working in the north of the state now. It was probably left locked to the cube because she didn't know the combo either. So there is clutter I can't remove.

When I had my own business the office was sharply crafted. The furniture was brand new, the walls freshly painted and the chairs and computers top of the line. The environment was a wonderful place to be in and have a working mind.

Cube farms are different. You get the equipment that is either left there, or next cab off the rank. I have a Mac Pro so I shouldn't complain too hard, but the rest of the stuff is the standard mish mash of what ever was around.

Controlling your work environment is important, especially so for getting the brain and body in a working state of mind. It is easier doing that with a home office than at a cube farm.

This is a talk by Jason Fried on work and why the modern office is based on distraction rather than meaningful work. Fried argues the problem is Managers and Meetings.

His depiction of a Manager is one of constant distraction. The role of a manager is to get updates and to ensure people are working on the correct end goal. One of the reasons for Agile and Lean is to make the work pull, kanban style, so that it isn't autocratic. It is self organizing instead. This means there is no reason for the role of manager.

I empathize on the meetings issue as well. When I first came to the current place I am working at there were way too many meetings. All the engineers were being dragged into every meeting by the project managers. The first thing we changed was that only the lead goes to meetings. If we need one of the other engineers we would go and get them. Soon after that the lead stopped going and no-one seemed to notice or care. Consequently I go to about a meeting a week now if not none a week.

A lot of positions in technology are talking jobs. The job of a PM is talking and reporting. I agree with Fried. By nature they are inherently intrusive by their job title, job position and responsibilities. It is the same for middle management such as Directors. They are by description intrusive.