The office does not have to be a desk

Expanded from a LinkedIn post originally published on 2026-09-08.

Rate my office setup out of 10.

One of the things I like most about working remotely is that "the office" doesn't always have to mean sitting behind a desk.

Some days I'm at a proper workstation with multiple monitors.

Other days it's a laptop, a sofa, a podcast in the background and a few uninterrupted hours of building.

I've found the environment matters a lot less than being able to get into a good flow state.

Although my back may disagree with this particular setup.

What does your ideal working setup look like?

#SoftwareEngineering #RemoteWork #SoftwareDevelopment #Entrepreneurship #Productivity

Flow beats furniture

There is a very specific kind of nonsense that creeps into conversations about remote work. People start acting as if the desk setup is the work. The monitor count, the chair, the keyboard, the background lighting, the plant that definitely did not need to be in the shot.

I like a proper setup as much as anyone. Multiple monitors are useful. A decent chair matters. A quiet room can be the difference between getting something shipped and spending the day pretending to concentrate.

But the best working setup is usually the one that lets you drop into the problem quickly and stay there for long enough to do something meaningful.

Remote work gives you more than one mode

Some work needs the full cockpit. Planning, debugging, infrastructure changes and deep code reviews are easier when the setup disappears into the background and everything is where you expect it to be.

Other work is lighter. Reading through docs, thinking through a product idea, sketching out a feature, reviewing notes. That can happen on a sofa with a laptop and a podcast humming away quietly in the background.

That is one of the underrated gifts of remote work. You can match the environment to the kind of thinking you need to do, rather than forcing every task through the same office-shaped hole.

The body gets a vote

There is one obvious catch: your back will eventually send a strongly worded complaint if you get too romantic about sofa-based productivity.

A bad posture setup can feel fine for a couple of hours and then quietly tax the rest of your day. I have absolutely learned this the boring way.

So the answer is not to pretend ergonomics do not matter. It is to stop treating the perfect setup as a prerequisite for useful work. Sometimes the right office is a desk. Sometimes it is a corner of the house where the noise drops and the work finally starts moving.