Since it is Friday, I thought I would take this chance to report on an exciting new experiment which I began this week: I'm using a standing desk! In fact, I am standing while I write this blog post.
As you can all probably guess, I spend every day in front of my computer, both during the school year when I am teaching online and during the summer when I am working on projects. My genius husband had decided some months ago that he wanted to switch to a standing desk, based on factors like the ones you can read about in this New York Times article: Stand Up While You Read This. He did lots of research and concluded that our best option was a Conset desk to be purchased from ErgoDepot.com. And here's the serendipity factor... when he talked to the folks at ErgoDepot out in Oregon, it turned out that the Conset America office is right here in North Carolina, just an hour's drive from where we live. So the nice folks at Conset (thank you, Cindy and Kate!) invited us to come into the shop and see the desks in action. I wasn't sure I wanted to get one myself, but as soon as I saw how easy it was to raise and lower the desk, I knew this was something I had to try!
And... WOW... it has been even better than I expected. Standing up, at least for me, completely changes how I feel while I am working. It makes me want to move around and stretch and even dance to the music (my office is at home, so I am not driving any officemates crazy by bouncing around). Plus, I am getting the full benefit of my big monitor now that I can really adjust the desk height - I wear trifocals, so finding the "sweet spot" where my eyes can focus right on the monitor is such a big plus for me! As I get used to standing (my goal is to be standing all day by the time school starts in August), I just raise and lower the desk as needed - a low position is perfect for me when sitting (short person that I am), and there are basically two different standing heights I use, depending on whether I am doing more reading on the monitor or whether I am mostly just using the keyboard and mouse. I thought I would need something to adjust the monitor height separately, but not at all - my monitor stand has a tilt option that has allowed me to find just the right combination of desk height and monitor angle for everything I have been working on this week.
Apparently, it's not just me who feels this way - here's a quote from a different NYTimes article, Can't Stand to Sit Too Long? There's a Desk for That, that conveys exactly what I have experienced this week myself:
I suspect that this is because when you’re standing, you feel a bit unchained from your desk. If I got stuck on a word or sentence as I wrote, I found myself shaking my arms, bouncing on my feet or stepping away from the desk for a bit — things I couldn’t do in a chair. Often, the antsy-ness seemed to relax my mind enough for me to get over my creative hurdle.Exactly my experience: I just feel less "stuck" with anything I am working on while standing, but at the same time I feel much more focused. I guess all those millions of years of evolution that got us to stand up on our hind legs were also busy making our brains feel good about that, too!
Anyway, I thought I would write about this in the blog here since probably there are some of you out there who are also in front of a computer monitor all day - and this might be something you want to try. Already in the first week, I am standing about 4-5 hours per day without any problem at all - it feels great, in fact! I'll report back in a few weeks about my progress towards my goal of standing all day. Meanwhile, here are some pictures - first, I'll embed the video from Conset that shows a desk in action, and then below the video is a picture of my own desk, lowered on the left and raised on the right.
Are any of you out there using a standing desk solution already? Feel free to chime in with comments... and not to worry: the regular Bestiaria will be back on Saturday morning! :-)
