Standing versus Sitting | Hacker News Reader

Standing versus Sitting

37signals.com

56 pointsnaish29 comments

Standing desks are great, especially if you have lower back problems. It does take at least a week to get used to it, because initially the pressure gets transfered from your back to your legs. If you can swing it, the ideal work setup for back health is a standing desk and a sofa or easy chair you can stretch out on with a laptop. I also have a medicine ball on the floor (you can use any sort of ball, soccer, basketball, etc) to put one of your feet on from time to time in order to change positions up a bit.

Another thing to think about is monitor position. Even with a standing desk, you don't want to be looking down into your monitor... you'll eventually mess up your neck. I'm relatively tall, so I have one of those monitor swingarm things that raises my monitor up to eye level.

A suggestion for those who are space-constrained... now that we have LCD panels, you can simply mount your screen on the wall, and then use a shelf or shelving "system" to create a "desk" mounted to the wall. This is what I did at home, and it cost < $100 for the LCD mount and semi-custom shelf/desk.

Standing is great, but walking is even better. I've been using a treadmill desk for the past 7 months and have seen the same benefits Jamis noted - less fatigue, better concentration, improved posture. Walking at a slow pace (.7 to 1.2 mph) is less stressful to your joints than standing still, but you don't break a sweat and can type, use a trackball, and talk on the phone comfortably.

i am having a hard time picturing a treadmill desk. are you joking? if not, do you have any references you can recommend on the logistics of it?

If you really want to get fancy, check out these desks: http://www.biomorphdesk.com

You can get them with quiet motors that enable you to go from sitting to standing at the touch of a button.

Coupled with an Aeron, this makes the perfect investment of your VC money for the entire team!

You jest, but I would seriously consider spending (my own) money on such a thing. Poor ergonomics can result in skeletal, muscular, and tendon stress injuries. I have yet to find a chair or desk that really suit my shape and posture, and the aching back I have at the end of the week is becoming more and more of a concern as time goes on.

Plus, if your startup fails, you can wheel your Aeron chair out of the door as a severance package while Michael Arrington flings mendacious personal attacks at you on TechCrunch with gleeful schadenfreude.

Supposedly Aeron chairs don't depreciate much over time. You could sell the chairs and even get most of your money back! I recall reading somewhere that the Aeron chairs companies bought during the big bubble were their most valuable assets when they went under.

Schadenfreude indeed.

They're like cars -- they depreciate a great deal as soon as you drive them off the lot, but then depreciation slows considerably. If you buy a used one and keep it in good condition, it probably won't depreciate hardly at all.

Aerons are about $400 used, last forever, and you can get $400 for it again if you want to sell it. Their utility as a symbol of excess and financial mismanagement died out in the previous dot-com bust. In fact, now that servers are cheap, you might as well spend your money on nice chairs and desks - at least they last forever.

The new metric for startup waste is the amount of time founders and their employees spend on social networking sites. If your CEO is averaging 50 TWEETS per day, you're fucked.

Out of curiosity, where do you find them used?

craig's list, and if you are in SF or Oakland there are a number of furniture places that buy and sell them.

When I was buying them in Austin a couple years back, I found they were about $600-$700 from used office furniture stores, though occasionally they'd show up on Craigslist for less. I bought the one I still have from the Arthur Andersen auction after the Enron scandal shut them down...got it for $385. I also got a truly awesome Keilhauer chair for $35 (list price ~$950, but everybody was after the Aerons, so the other chairs went for nothing, even though most were really nice chairs), which I also kept. Maybe Aerons come down in price in the past two years, or are cheaper here in the valley, I dunno.

But I agree, spending a few grand on every new employee for a nice working environment, the keyboard they like, a great chair, a good desk, a nice top of the line computer with dual monitors, is just sound business sense. The money spent will disappear into noise by the time you add their annual salary to their line on your expense report. And the work environment will last for years, just upgrade the computer every 18-24 months, and the monitors every 3 years, and you've got a fat and sassy employee that feels like you appreciate them (assuming you actually do appreciate them and treat them with respect in addition to giving them great tools with which to work). And the chair is the single most important part of that equation. I'd never ask anyone to sit 8 hours in a crappy chair.

I find that I frequently have to get up and pace when doing any work that requires thinking work. I don't know that I'd like to work while standing however.I have a tendency to lock my knees and this leads to unfortunate consequences.

I've been working standing for the last few months, with similar results. It's definitely easier on my back, and seems to be good for my wrists as well. If you try it, make sure you mount the monitor up at eye level. When you're standing up straight, there's a lot more distance between your wrists and your eyes.

That's pretty neat. $1295 is a bit steep for me though.

I'm pretty happy with my current desk. The top is just a 68"x30" (or so) wood piece from Ikea, with legs from Ikea as well. It's very sturdy. And, while it's not beautiful like the Amish desk, it does possess its own spare elegance.

It has no drawers or shelves or anything fancy like that. For storage I've just stuck a couple mobile file cabinets underneath.

Instead of using a keyboard tray I just put my keyboard in my lap, which actually is very comfortable and leaves me space in front of my monitor so that I can sketch ideas.

The total was around $200. It's not a stand up table but I think it would be fairly easy to just get some new legs and bolt them on.

I read once in Discover Magazine that standing (and, to a lesser extent, sitting up) causes the release of stress hormones that impair thinking. Given that, a standing desk may not truly be all that.(Sorry, I couldn't find a link to it on the website. I have had trouble finding articlelettes in the R&D section of the magazine with the website's search feature before.)

Of course, whenever I need to do any truly deep thinking about a problem, it's usually not at my desk, so perhaps that detriment may not really be that important

Meanwhile, if you really want to take having an active posture while working to its extreme, I once read an article about treadmill desks...

I'll have to go home and put cinder blocks under my desk legs to prop it up to standing level and try it. I have recently noticed that I have leg fatigue at the end of each day from sitting so much, and I do all my thinking while pacing about anyway, so standing seems like an interesting option.

I am still laughing out loud about an Amish computer desk.

I am not sure I wish to stand all day, I really would prefer to go back and forth between the two options perhaps with a laptop or two workstations.

Can't believe they missed the opportunity to mention Hemingway.

From what I read years ago, standing is better for your back than sitting. Especially the kind of sitting where the person slouches for hours at a time.

I've always wanted to get one of those big exercise balls to replace my general issue office chair, but a desk that I could stand at would be nice, too.

Does anyone know where one can get an adjustable table for a little cheaper? $1200 is a little out of my budget.

a "kneeling chair" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kneeling_chair) is a similar solution that keeps your spine straight but doesnt put stress on your legs. i have a friend who has one and he loves it

I had a kneeling chair once. They are great if you have a regular chair to alternate with every few hours, but kneeling for an entire day gets hard on the knees. The main benefit for me was to switch between my kneeling chair and my regular one every 3-4 hours.

I helped my dad start an office furniture store back in the 90's, so I learned a bit about ergonomics by osmosis.

The central problem with kneeling chairs is that one of the most important ergonomic principles is that you have a natural (and necessary) propensity to shift positions every few hours. Kneeling chairs don't allow you a range of positions the way that conventional chairs, exercise balls, standing, etc. do. The ergonomics people I knew always went out of their way to say kneeling chairs were actually a bad idea.

Having said that, whatever works for you, works for you. But for people considering a kneeling chair, you want to be careful not to just try it in the store for 10 minutes, then buy it.

I had a kneeling chair. It was great for 10 minutes, but after several weeks I got fed up with the strain it put on my lower back.

That was the point. You have to build up the small muscles that support your spine. Until that has happened, your lower back will hurt ... but that is a good sign. Once the muscles have developed, you can sit for hours and your posture is dramatically improved. That is what happened for me.

But now I'm thinking standing or walking is the way to go. There is deep evidence that walking while working improves performance ... and is more fun.

You can get a great standing desk at Ikea for about 100 bucks. I swear by mine.

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