For the past few weeks I’ve been sitting in a chair at a computer for so many hours a day that my body started rebelling. I knew I couldn’t keep it up–it was getting too hard to stay in the same position for so many hours straight. So I decided maybe it was time to experiment with a standing desk.
I decided that I shouldn’t buy a standing desk if I wasn’t sure whether I would use it, so I kluged together a desk at about the right height with a milk crate and a few other odd-n-ends from around my office. The first few days of standing went really well–I liked how it felt to get out of my chair and the change kept me focused and productive.
But I noticed one major problem. I do a lot of one-on-one meetings with faculty, and they became awkward if I was standing at my desk instead of sitting. But I needed to stand to work at my computer (usually I’m demo-ing some software with faculty during our meetings, so I turn my big iMac screen so we can both see it as I’m talking with them). The person I was meeting with invariably felt like they needed to stand up, too. It made our interactions less personable and chatty. I noticed that they apologized often about ‘interrupting me,’ even if we had an appointment to meet together.
On Day four of my standing desk my left knee began to bother me, an IT-band issue, apparently. By Day 5 it pushed me into a chair more often–the tightness in my knee becoming more unbearable as the day wore on.
So the upshot of the experience is that I’m still unsure whether I’ll invest in a standing desk. I think it feels good to have a different workspace, especially one that gets me out of my desk chair. But I think the same types of problems that I have with sitting all day will also happen if I stand all day (perhaps even more so, since I’m standing on one organic leg and one bionic one).
What about you, have you experimented with a standing desk? If so, did you find that it worked well, or did you lose interest in it once the novelty wore off?