Productive Organizer

I recently switch to a standing desk setup in hopes that my wellness and productivity can be improved. I am almost 2 weeks into this and I did make some adjustments to my standing desk.

[First part: Why I switch to a standing desk setup >>]

It would seem that I can get adjusted to working in a standing position. Essentially, I don’t expect to work as much as when I am in office.

Having said that, it can be really tiring to work standing. I realize that I have a tendancy of wanting to lean my pelvic area on the desk.

To circumvent this I may need to do some hip rotation while I am typing.

What do you guys think of my setup?

I got intrigue this morning when I came across Timothy Ferriss post on how sitting too much is really bad for health.

- As the New York Times recently wrote, sitting kills.
- In a study that tracked over 17,000 Canadians for 12 years, researchers found that people who sat more had a higher risk of death, independent of whether or not they exercised.
- According to a 2003-2004 U.S. survey, Americans spend over half of their time awake sitting.
- In an article published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, researcher Elin Ekblom-Bak found that “after four hours of sitting, the body starts to send harmful signals” that cause the genes regulating glucose and lipose levels in the body to shut down.

For one thing it really affects your blood circulation and could lead to diabetic, heart, blood pressure problems.

Spending much time in front of the desk

As a computer engineer and by night a blogger, I do have to spend much time in front of the PC. It has come to a stage where I wonder if this can be one of the contributing reasons to some of my health concerns.

Which is why I try for a few days to switch to a standing computer setup

Don’t you get tired standing up all the time?

And that is one of the primarily I quitted. It can get pretty tiring. But when I review what I did the last time round I realise that one of the main reasons I couldn’t do it is because

1. The display are not elevated till a level closer to the eyes. I am still straining my neck to view at a very far viewing angle.
2. Perhaps I didn’t want to healthy bad enough. Had I want to, I would have persevere and improve my set up.

Standing Desk Act II

I decide to go ahead and try this the second time round, and hope that my perseverance is much better this time around.

I came across Gina Trapani of Lifehacker fame’s own website with a few suggestions how to create your own standing desk.

I particularly like the second setup, as i t has 2 nice elevated boards. But knowing how impulsive and easy I will fall off some productivity bandwagon, I decide to try to see if I am used to this.

I have many financial annual reports from my interest in investing so I decide to make use of them, put them in Xerox box and together with my SilverStone CPU casing, make my standing monitor setup.

I elevate my keyboards and mouse in similar ways.

This does not look like a long term solution but it act as a good test bed to see if I can adjust to this way of doing things.

The standing posture is weird

I realize that another area that I need to overcome is standing with the right posture. Turns out even when standing up my back is still in a round shape.

The feet hurts

The first thing I notice after standing for less than 30 minutes is the heels of the feel are aching.

I learn this the first time round, and this time I decide to wear my trusty rubber slippers,

Using a Timer to incorporate some light workouts

Since you are standing up, you can make use of timer software that tells you to roll your hips every 5 minutes. This would benefit your wellness greatly I believe.

Will you switch to a standing setup?

I find that in my working culture it is difficult to request your work setup to change to a standing setup. Especially in my new office environment where everyone have a low partition and you would look weird if you are the only one standing up.

I hope that by doing this, I can see improvement in wellness and my level of energy.

If you guys have switched to a standing desk and have experience to share do send your comments here.

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Here is a nice account on TIPB that shares the story of how an IT Administrator uses the iPad in his daily work.

Before the iPad, I was always having to ask people to move so I could use Remote Desktop on their systems to remote in and look at settings on the servers to figure out what the problem is. Now with the iPad, I keep the servers in Mocha RDP’s app for quick access to the servers, or to my Desktop when I’m away from my desk. the iPad works for about 80% of what I need when I’m working on a system, but for that other 20%, having my Windows 7 Desktop so easily accessible is a Godsend.

I been in his shoes now and then, and one of the main benefits of tablets like the iPad is really to enable you quick access to troubleshoot your servers and computers when you are not there.

Overall, I bought the iPad hoping I could use it all day to remote into the servers, and maybe to control the soundboard. In fact what I found was so much more. It’s totally revolutionized how I do my job – more so than my iPhone – just because of it’s larger screen. I would highly recommend the iPad for any systems administrators who constantly have to wander yet still have access to the servers.

This could be very very useful when you are travelling home from work and some shit crops up and you need to access to that server.

My setup is even better (I think!). Team Viewer have turn our smartphones into VNC and Remoting device such that I use it to check on the stock market through the computer at home or to review certain documents that is only accessible on the home pc.

Here is my TeamViewer Remoting Setup Guide.