Standing Desk Experiment and Experiences

Round 1, 2007

Back in 2007 I read a few articles about the merits of stand-up desks, in regards to health and productivity. According to the New York Times and other sources, standing desks have been not quite common, but neither terribly uncommon, for many years. Sitting all the time is apparently quite unhealthy. Famously, Donald Rumsfeld used one, and maybe it helped him come up with this?

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

(This quote got a lot of chuckles, including from me; but it is actually a good and important point. I wish someone less politically charged had popularized it. Many commentators suggest that Rumsfeld’s phrasing and concern for unknown unknowns came from Werner Erhard, himself a very smart but somewhat odd fellow.)

Inspired to try out standing up at work, I set up perhaps the world’s ugliest standing desk:

2007 Standing Desk

I took an old and already-ugly normal desk, and put it on primitive stilts constructed in about 30 minutes for about $10. This was marginally acceptable for the out-of-the-way room I was using as a home office at the time. To make the most of things, I took the photo above with plenty of semi-obsolete technology and ample wiring in view. Looking back at this photo, I observe that my wife is an amazingly tolerant and loving woman.

In spite of the poor aesthetics, I enjoyed this desk for many months, and noticed an increase in my productivity and focus, discussed more at the end of this post. At the same time, some minor backaches and pains went away, and I slept better. (Be warned though, that it takes some getting used to, the first couple of weeks are tough.)

Functionally speaking, the only weakness of this arrangement was that the monitors were not high enough relative to the keyboard height.

This first-generation experiment fell into disuse when I set up a new home office with tasteful solid wood furniture and other decor, in a prominent front room of my home, at “only” 10x the cost of my old home office. The desk above went to the offices of my old firm where a couple of people tried it out, then eventually discarded it. (My new home office is not pictured here; it looks approximately like a page in the catalog of a furniture store – nice, tasteful, boring. It also contains much better hardware.)

Round 2, 2010

Inspired again by further press coverage, I’m trying out a standing desk again in 2010. I looked around at various power-adjustable desks from GeekDesk, Anthro, and Relax the Back. These have several problems:

  1. While I’m willing to spend what it takes, power adjustable desks are a bit costly for an experiment. None of them are a model of desk I’d want anyway for sitting.
  2. They only solve the keyboard height problem (the main desk surface height), they generally don’t address the height of the monitors at all. (However, Anthro has solutions for this.)
  3. They are much deeper than I need.

Instead, at the beginning of May I set up another homegrown (and slightly less visually offensive) arrangement:

2010 Standing Desk

This setup is also quite cheap, around $150 total. It is a metal shelf/rack, with an extra protruding MDF shelf screwed on to form a keyboard/mouse surface. The shelves are all adjustable, so I moved the top (computer/screen) and middle (keyboard/most) shelves up and down a few times to find the most comfortable heights: I look straight ahead at the screens, and my elbows at at 90 degrees (wrists straight) while typing.  (Update: Jeremy, a reader, set up something similar.)

I wired up some leftover accessories (display, keyboard, mouse, etc. – my good stuff is in my home office, try not to laugh at the use of a spare low-end Microsoft mouse and small monitor with my MBP). This includes a very old printer that I pulled out of storage, partly as ballast and partly to just see if it still works. (It does, but an HP LaserJet 1100 is terribly slow by today’s standards, and I may replace the whole thing when my toner on hand runs out. A personal printer at my desk is more convenient than the better printers a short walk away.)

I located this at my “work” office away from home, so as not to re-test the tolerance of the above-mentioned wife. My time is split between home and work offices, and occasionally cafes, so I stand perhaps 20 hours per week on average. Even when at the standing desk, I’ll grab a nearby chair to make a phone call.

The Standing Experience

Relative to sitting, I’ve noticed a number of benefits:

  • I focus more completely on my work, with less tendency to become distracted.
  • More specifically, I write more (text, code) and read less.
  • My back, and whole body feed better, aside from that first week.
  • I move around, shifting weight, standing on one foot for a moment, etc.; I experience no stiffness or aches that sometimes result from hours of sitting.
  • My urge to go buy a new chair went away; I already have a good chair in my home office, and rarely sit while at work.

In summary, this seems like a fairly substantial win, one month in to the experiment. I’ll report back later this year.

A bit of commentary: lots of people talk about their standing desks with some degree of bravado. That is entirely unjustified; outside of office workers, a large portion of the workforce spends most of every day standing and working. It’s the traditional sitting office worker who is doing something unusual.

Book Giveaway at BarCampSTL, Nov. 7

A while back I wrote that The World is My Warehouse, and I’ve been making that more true ever since. One tiny example is the stack of books below, which I’m giving away tomorrow at Bar Camp St. Louis.

Cordes books to give away at BarCamp

Please be polite, and only take one book per person.

Two of the books are about procrastination. You are welcome to them; but my advice on procrastication is:

  • Don’t read about procrastination. Rather:
  • Do some work,
  • Produce something of value,
  • or engage in worthwhile leisure.

Update: The book giveaway was a success, the books are gone. It further inspired at least one other attendee to give away some books also.

Saying No to say Yes

In The Secrets of Consulting (a book, along with its sequel, about a lot more than consulting), Jerry Weinberg offered the Law of Raspberry Jam:

the wider you spread it, the thinner it gets

I thought about that a lot a few years ago when I attended the AYE conference (an experience I heartily recommend), along with the “Yes/No Medallion” that Jerry borrowed from Virginia Satir. Years onward, I am still struck by the  notion of saying No to say Yes. My inclination and habit is to say Yes to many projects, many features, many business ideas, many of everything. This has obvious benefits but also has a cost – sometimes I am spread too thin to have the impact I intend.

The fewer things I (we, you) focus on, the greater our impact on those top priorities. Of course there is inevitable pushback from associates, customers, and family members about Nos. This pushback is worth facing, because the more Nos, the more powerful the Yesses.

(An aside: in a half hour of online research, I was unable to definitively conclude where the name of the above Law originated.) 

Incompetence -> Progress

From http://www.theodoregray.com/BrainRot/index.html

“The most profound engine of civilization is the inability of a larger and larger fraction of the population to do the basic things needed to survive.  Many people fail to realize this.”

“Technology’s greatest contribution is to permit people to be incompetent at a larger and larger range of things.  Only by embracing such incompetence is the human race able to progress.”

It’s a good read, with important thoughts on civilization and education.  It is part of the introduction to a book about Mathematica, a truly amazing piece of software. (Mathematica, was amazing when I used it in the 1990s, I can scarcely imagine what it does now.)

My name is Kyle, and I’m an Infoholic

I recently read Tim Ferriss’s book The Four Hour Work Week, colloquially called 4HWW. The book is short, dense with ideas, and easily worth the $12 price. I recommend the book in spite of:

  • Questions about the veracity of Ferriss’s claimed accomplishments
  • Criticisms that some of his techniques are not as broadly applicable as he makes them sound
  • The fact that the author apparently fell for a bogus chain-letter email and reprinted it on page 284. Ooops – how embarrassing!
  • I’d guess he’s spending more like 80 hours per week promoting his book over the last few months, with many media appearances, interviews, etc.

Among his main points (outsource more, delegate more, sell products rather than services, travel, etc.), the key idea that stood out for me is the “low-information diet”: read less, watch less, surf the web less. This is nothing new of course (I even touched on it myself in an earlier post), but Ferriss makes a compelling case.

Unfortunately, upon self-examination the truth hurts:

  • I read too many books, even though I’ve gotten rid of many recently
  • I read too many magazines.
  • I read too many web sites.
  • I subscribe to too many RSS/Atom feeds.
  • I check email too often.

In my defense, I also somehow write a lot of software, solve many customer problems, and much of the information I consume is at least tangentially related to those sources of value. I read quickly, and I don’t watch television, so this excessive consumption is not as time consuming as it could be.

Still, I need something closer to Ferriss’s low-information diet. I don’t have the guts to go cold turkey, and part of the service we offer to our customers is fast response to problems, so I won’t go as far as he suggests. I will spend less time consuming input and more time producing output.

Update in 2009: This remains an ongoing struggle, but I do quite often manage entire days of producing most of the day and consuming only in short breaks.

TEDTalks – Ideas Worth Spreading – Video Worth Watching

TED is an annual conference at which a bunch of (hopefully?) remarkable people say remarkable things. I’m using the word in a Seth Godin sort of way: remarkable things are those which inspire people to literally remark about them.

It appears to be “A-list” event, meaning that I’m not likely to make the cut anytime soon.

Fortunately, many TED sessions are available to the rest of us online: TEDTalks. Here are some that I bookmarked to watch again; the download links are for QuickTime videos. Many of these are also on Google Video or elsewhere.

Burt Rutan

Barry Schwartz

Malcom Gladwell

Steven Levitt

Nicholas Negroponte

Hans Rosling (One word summary: Wow.)

Ken Robinson – Do schools today kill creativity?

Dan Gilbert – The (misguided) pursuit of happiness

The Secret of Happiness, according to Dan Gilbert:

  1. Accrue wealth, power, and prestige. Then lose it.
  2. Spend as much of your life in prison as you possibly can.
  3. Make someone else really, really rich.
  4. Never ever join the Beatles.

(watch the video for the story behind this)