Setup guide
Four small things, held for thousands of hours.
Most desk pain is not caused by one dramatic thing. It is four small misalignments, each almost unnoticeable on its own, repeated every working day for years. Correcting them takes about twenty minutes and costs nothing to try.
Work in this order. Each step changes the one after it, so doing them out of sequence means doing them twice.
Start with the chair
Set the seat height so your feet rest flat on the floor and your knees sit at roughly a right angle, with your hips level with or very slightly above your knees.
If your feet dangle, your lower back is carrying weight it should not be. Lower the chair. If the desk is then too high for your arms, you need a footrest rather than a compromise.
Then sit back. The entire purpose of a backrest is to take your weight, and perching on the front edge means your spine does that work unaided for eight hours. If the chair's curve does not meet the small of your back, fill the gap — that hollow is where slumping begins. Seating and lumbar support.
Then the screen
The top of the screen should sit level with, or just below, your eyes. About an arm's length away. Directly in front of you, not angled off to one side — a screen set at an angle means your neck is rotated all day.
A laptop cannot do this on its own. The screen and keyboard are fixed together, so raising the screen to the right height puts the keyboard at the wrong one. The fix is to lift the laptop and add a separate keyboard and mouse. This is the change most people feel fastest, usually within a few days. Monitor arms and risers.
Then your hands
Elbows at roughly a right angle, upper arms hanging close to your body rather than reaching forward. The keyboard sits at that elbow height, so your wrists stay flat instead of bending upward over the front edge.
Keep the mouse immediately beside the keyboard. Reaching sideways for it loads one shoulder continuously, and because the movement is small you will never notice you are doing it.
One correction worth making: rest your wrists between bursts of typing, not during. A wrist rest is a place to pause, not a pivot to type from. Wrist and palm rests.
Then the light
Eyes tire from constant adjustment. If your screen is the brightest thing in a dim room, your pupils spend the evening correcting between the two, and that is what aches by ten o'clock.
Light the room, not just the screen. Put windows to the side of your desk — behind you they reflect off the display, in front of you they put you in silhouette and you squint. Point any lamp at the desk rather than at the screen, or use a light built to throw light forward without touching the display.
Then move
The best posture is the next one. No position is good for eight hours, including a perfect one.
Change something every thirty to forty-five minutes. Stand up, walk to the kettle, roll your shoulders back. A flawlessly arranged desk you never leave is still worse for you than an average one you get up from regularly — which is worth remembering before spending money on any of this.
The two-minute check
Run through this at your desk right now.
- Feet flat on the floor, knees near a right angle
- Back against the backrest, lower curve supported
- Top of the screen at eye level, an arm's length away
- Screen straight ahead, not off to one side
- Elbows near a right angle, wrists flat
- Mouse beside the keyboard, not out at a reach
- Room lit, no glare across the display
- Something changes every half hour or so
When to have it looked at
Everything above addresses the ache that comes from how you sit. It is not a treatment for an injury.
Pain that wakes you at night, numbness or tingling in your hands or arms, or anything that has not eased after a couple of weeks with a better setup is worth taking to a GP or a physiotherapist. A monitor stand will not fix a trapped nerve, and time spent hoping it might is time the problem has to get worse in.