The Standing Desk

Dave, My OPOWER colleague switched from a normal office desk & chair situation to a standing desk more than a year ago and ever since, I’d been considering doing the same.  For my entire programming career, I’ve had terrible posture in my chair and tended to do “the maxell pose” where my wrists are resting at a severe angle on the lip of my desk.

There have been a couple articles recently about the effects of sitting in a chair all day that pushed me to action.  This article from business week was particularly eye opening.

OPOWER is super cool about empowering developers to be more productive/comfortable/happy/etc so getting approval for expensing some generic Ikea furniture was as easy as a head nod.  A couple weekends ago, I drove down to Ikea and picked up an Utby desk for about $100 and an Ekby Viktor shelf with Capita legs for another $20 or so.  I didn’t think the desk by itself was going to be quite at the recommended elbow height, so I swung by Home Depot and got 4 cinder blocks too.

I ended up putting a stack of paper between my monitor and the shelf to really get it up at eye level and I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out:

Dave’s setup is very similar, but he seems to like focusing down on his single screen whereas I like having a couple monitors at different focus points where I can physically distinguish tasks (documentation, music, images on my laptop off to the side and development tasks on the main monitor straight ahead).

Dave at his standing desk

It’s been a couple weeks since I switched and I can draw the following conclusions so far:

• Your feet hurt like a sonofabitch at the end of 8, 9, 10 hours if you’re not used to standing that whole time
• A little bar stool or some off-the-floor step helps a lot in shifting your weight around so you’re not always bearing down on both heels
• My back feels a ton better
• I feel more productive (though I don’t know empirically if I actually am) because (a) I feel really focused on the monitor right in front of me — more so than when sitting down and (b) I’m a little more self-conscious of my screen being visible to everyone walking by, so I suspect I’ve got a higher percentage of work-related stuff on my screen at all times than I did before.