Ask Slashdot: What Is the Best Position To Work For Long Hours?

New submitter damitr asks: "What is the most ergonomic position if you are working with a laptop or a desktop (with or without wireless keyboard and mouse) for long hours at stretch? Is bean bag for sitting with a laptop a good option? What is the best way to use a desktop without causing tennis elbow and backache/neck problems?"

Standing Desk setup

[Bananatree3]

Here is a log of a 3-week experiment [fastfedora.com] using a stand up desk. FYI for comparison.

Recumbent.

[couchslug]

There is good reason modern jet fighters have recumbent seating, and it's not just for G forces.

I inherited a power recliner and can spend many hours surfing in it with zero discomfort.

swiss ball

[cnastase]

Sit on a ball and get up every hour and walk for 5-10 minutes. We tend to lean somewhat when sitting in a chair, with the ball that's not very handy since you'll lose balance. Also you can bounce and annoy everyone else in the room. I have some back problems and a swiss ball has been strongly recommended for my recovery after a herniated disc surgery. I use it at work. Takes a while getting used to it at first, since the back muscles are lazy due to sitting in chairs, but eventually you'll get there if you really want to. And don't forget to get up and walk every once in a while.

Get a Monitor Stand

[VernonNemitz]

If you can raise your monitor so that you directly face it without leaning or bending your neck downward, this will help you retain a vertical posture, which in turn leads to being comfortable longer. I've built myself a number of monitor stands over the years; all it takes is 3 pieces of wood (some even looked professional, because I bought quality wood). The one I'm at now lifts the monitor about 10 inches off the desk. Your preference may be different, of course.

Re:none

[TheLink]

Here's what I think - hospital reclined bed position with the fancy anti-bedsore mattresses, if patients can survive that for hours, office workers can. The usual office chairs and fancy "modern ergonomics" are bullshit[1] - it's amazing how after thousands of years of making chairs, decent comfortable ones are still so expensive.

As for that standing fad, there's plenty of evidence that prolonged standing causes problems. Simple rule of thumb, if it hurts don't keep doing it for a long time.

Keep in mind the minimum amount of exercise to maintain reasonable health, supposedly short high intensity exercise is more time efficient. I won't be surprised if it's true - since most animals don't spend hours fighting or running. It's just a short high intense burst up to a max of a few minutes, then
a) either they die or they survive to live another day.
b) they catch and eat what they are chasing for dinner.

So put it all together and perhaps we should recline while doing "office work", then every now and then walk about for a bit and then do very fast sprints. ;)

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6187080.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Seems to imply they only tested up to 135 and said it was least pronounced at 135. While it does show that sitting up straight does put more stress (despite those stupid claims of sitting up straight being good), if they didn't test 180 (or more) then their study is still flawed isn't it?

Whatever you do, keep moving.

[VortexCortex]

If you don't move for long periods of time you could cause deep vein thrombosis, and die from blood clots.

Long hours coding are best avoided.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Most comments here talk about taking breaks to do minor calisthenics to keep the circulation and other minor ailments away. Or about eye strain etc. But one of the most important thing doing the heavy lifting during coding is the brain. And one has to rest and sharpen the brain too. Long hours are brutal on the brain. Brain during waking hours keeps lots and lots of stuff in local temporary memory. These experiences and lessons must be transcribed to long term storage. That happens during the sleep. Continuing long hours without sleep will dull your brain and the code will be buggy. I have my pet theory almost all the bugs are coded in between 1 PM and 3 PM, when the body is digesting lunch and brain wants to go to sleep. So try to work at least a power nap in it. Slogging for long hours without break would lead to very low productivity near the end.

This is especially true while debugging. Only when you stop looking at code start thinking about something else things work out. Countless number of times, I log out at 5PM to catch the 5:15 trolley, while walking back thinking about "pick dry cleaning, running low on coffee but can last another day, today is karate class day for the kid.." it would suddenly strike me, "wait a minute, in this function I am deleting invalid bodies, but the caller's caller of this function is looping through the body list, that is why the grandparent's loop is crashing in the next increment of the loop index". Such things have happened so many times. I think coding is done in many small bursts of activity with lots of thinking in between. Long coding sessions are not likely to be very productive.

Re:none

[supercrisp]

My lower back health and mood changed greatly when I started taking breaks every half hour to do push-ups, planks, lunges, squats, whatever would get my blood flowing. I also lost about 5 pounds in 15 weeks. I highly recommend getting up and moving around. It really brightened the day.