What’s on Your Desk: Paula Buick

With so many different creative minds under one roof, we all organize our work in a different way. I recently sat down with Paula Buick, PAYETTE’s Director of Healthcare and Health Sciences Planning, to discuss how her daily routine informs how she maintains her workspace. Paula spends time away from the office, meeting clients on site so that she can conduct operational reviews of their existing programming; she brings this information back to her desk, where her planning efforts continue. At PAYETTE, we have an open plan office with similar table / desk setups for each staff member to facilitate collaboration. We have the ability to make our workstations mobile – moving to a new station should be seamless with rolling filing cabinets (many equipped with cushion tops to make a quick stool) and the same resources available at each station.

Due to Paula’s role, she equips her desk a bit differently than her neighbors, who are mostly architects. Her calculator and headphones are often front-and-center on her desk, alongside a thick stack of documents that feature data matrices and program plans. For this work, Paula often refers to her overflowing referential library. The library, which occupies the long upper shelf of her desk and a couple of boxes on the floor, contains books on a wide-range of subjects; many of these titles are related to her planning work, but some Calvin and Hobbes and short stories are mixed in, too. The most recent addition to the library is a book called The Architect Says, which she picked up on a trip to Martha’s Vineyard.

Paula looks to lighter books like that one for relief throughout the day, something that she finds to be important due to the complex nature of her planning projects. For other moments of relief, she doesn’t have to look far. She keeps family photos close-by, displayed under her library. The desktop background for each of her monitors is a picture of sheep from West Cork, a reminder of her home country. Badges from recent conferences are exhibited, as well as gifts from her former colleagues at the MIT Center for Technology, and souvenirs from each of her site visits. Paula also has a namesake paperweight and a magnetic building block puzzle, which people tend to play with as they stop by for meetings.

What’s on your desk? Where do you find inspiration in the workplace?