You can now officially add me to the list of standing desk converts.

Reasons

A few weeks ago while at the gym I tweaked my back. Flash forward another two weeks and my back still hadn’t gotten any better. It was fine in the mornings, but by the end of the day I couldn’t bend over it was so painful.

Part of the problem was that I have horrible posture when sitting down.

So I decided to give a standing desk a try. While my setup isn’t perfect (the keyboard and track pad are too high. also it’s a chair standing on a desk), after a solid week of using it I think I will be investing in a proper standing desk arrangement, it has really improved my back that much.

But I’m not going to talk about the health benefits. I’m going to talk about the ansiliary benefits of not sitting down while being at a computer.

Why It’s Awesome

The first and foremost reason is that I am more productive¹.

If I’m sitting down, I feel like I’m “relaxing” and it’s ok to get distracted by reddit/twitter/digg for an hour or more at a time. If I’m standing, I actually feel like I’m wasting time intead of just browsing (intead of ignoring just the nagging feeling that I’m wasting time).

The second reason has to do with the way that I work.

Sometimes I work best by pacing. Being at a standing desk makes it trivial to wander away while deep in thought instead of just staring at my screen… which inevitably leads to getting distracted.

Tablet Convert

Something that I’ve said since the release of the iPad was that “I have no use for a tablet”. This is true because I’m on my computer almost my entire waking weekday and any kind of entertainment an iPad would provide I would just do at my desk (surfing reddit/twitter/etc).

However, with this new found “distractionless mode” I now have a use case for a tablet while sitting down somewhere other than at my computer. I haven’t purchased a tablet yet, but am strongly considering it for this reason.

Try it

I cannot recommend enough that you try a standing desk. I went cold-turkey and had a set up that didn’t allow me to sit down at all if my legs got tired. I found that they didn’t, but you might be different, so try something that allows you to sit down.

My Setup