Your cat is not sabotaging your work out of spite; from her perspective the desk is the finest real estate in the house — elevated, warm from the laptop, covered in interesting moving objects, and occupied for hours by her favorite person, whose attention visibly lives there. Sitting on the keyboard is simply the most efficient way to insert herself into everything the desk means. Banishment ends the battle but loses the companionship that makes working from home pleasant, so the smarter goal is negotiation: give her a legitimate desk presence that beats the keyboard.
Install the decoy desk bed
Place a shallow box, a folded fleece, or a low heated pad on the desk itself, close enough that you can stroke her without reaching, ideally with a sightline to your screen and the window. Cats choose the keyboard partly because it is where you look; a spot inside your gaze competes surprisingly well. The first times she steps into it, reward immediately — attention, a quiet word, a small treat — and when she steps on the keys, lift her into the spot without comment and reward her there instead. Within days, most cats begin arriving at their own square and settling, because it pays better than the keyboard ever did.
Drain the motive before deep work
Desk invasions peak when a cat is rested, bored, and watching a motionless human ignore her. A brisk play session before your longest work block — wand toy, stairs, a hallway chase — followed by a meal or puzzle, flips her into groom-and-sleep mode right as you need focus. Align that rhythm with your calendar: play before the morning block, a smaller top-up before the afternoon one. A cat who has hunted, eaten, and washed will use the desk bed for its intended purpose, which is sleeping decoratively beside you through meetings and deadlines alike.
Desk hygiene for the moments she still tests you
Negotiation is not surrender — protect the work itself. Use a keyboard cover or a hard laptop stand cover when you step away, keep drinks in a lidded bottle rather than an open mug near the keys, and tidy cables and sticky notes that invite batting. If she walks across during a delicate task, park her gently in her spot and, if she repeats it three times in a row, give her the room's other pleasure — a window perch session with a puzzle — rather than escalating into scolding that makes the desk more emotionally charged. Never use sprays or startling; they teach fear of you at work, not love of her spot.
Iterate like it is a small experiment
Notice what actually drives her visits: cold rooms push her toward laptop heat, so a warmer pad matters; a new screen's movement fascinates some cats, so angle matters; some simply keep your schedule and appear at the same hour daily, which a pre-emptive play break solves. Change one variable at a time and watch the result over a few days. Soon the sight of her curled in her box beside the monitor becomes part of the workday itself — companionship preserved, keyboard surrendered back to you. For the next workday experiment, put a follow-up question to KinsLe's Kinny; he answers using the KinsLe Answers library.