Standing Up

Thanks to Steve for putting this idea into my head – working standing up. I’m surprised it’s never crossed my mind before, especially since I actually do it for an hour or so most mornings in the kitchen. That’s great, because you can set up the laptop, kettle and teapot in a convenient arrangement and have a constant supply of tea without stopping work. But doing it ‘on purpose’ in the office, I’d never thought of.

So why work standing up? For one thing, supposedly it’s much better for your body than sitting all day, or as a completely different Steve puts it, in this entertaining video, you never see a chimpanzee in a chair. Mind you, I’ve seen chimpanzees sitting in chairs, and I tend to suspect the only reason they don’t in the wild is because they can’t make chairs themselves. They’re certainly happy enough to sit in ours though. Anyway, the point is that the human body is allegedly not designed to adopt a chair posture for 8 hours a day.

In my case, I don’t even sit in a chair. I might start the day sitting in it (sometimes) but give it an hour or two and I’m more or less lying down with my feet propped against the wall and my arms having to twist to reach the keyboard. Luckily this hasn’t caused me any problems yet (other than horrified looks from wiser people) but I suppose I might be storing lots up for the future, I don’t know.

I think you can tell I don’t take posture or the threat of back trouble very seriously (at least not yet), but there’s more to working standing up than that. The part that really interests me is more psychological – you’re bound to feel more alert and thus be more productive when you’re standing. Now that I think about it, this is definitely the case for me in my morning kitchen working, although perhaps the vast quantities of tea also play a part.

Another thing is that you can move around. I like to use multiple computers, and in a chair you can only possibly have one keyboard in a convenient place. My solution to this, other than unpleasant stretching, tends to be putting keyboards on top of each other or moving them around, which doesn’t really work. Propelling yourself in your chair (assuming it’s on wheels) is also a silly idea. But if you were standing up, a quick step to one side would be no problem at all.

As a bonus, machines that are set up for a standing adult to use are out of reach of toddlers, which would save me an awful lot of exasperation. “Oh, but she’ll just stand on a chair,” you say? There is no chair! This is pure genius.

So, my project for the weekend – somehow reorganise the office so all keyboards and monitors are at standing height.