Before they were called cubicles, the prefabricated office furniture we all now take despondently for granted was part of an idea called an “Action Office”. Though they’ve apparently lost their way at Herman Miller where the idea was born the idea was, at least in part, that:
[…] during the 20th century, the office environment had changed substantially, especially when considering the dramatic increase in the amount of information being processed. Despite the change in what an employee had to analyze, organize, and maintain on a daily basis, the basic layout of the corporate office had remained largely unchanged, with employees sitting behind rows of traditional desks in a large open room that was devoid of privacy. Propst’s studies suggested that an open environment actually reduced communication between employees, and impeded personal initiative. On this, Propst commented that “one of the regrettable conditions of present day offices is the tendency to provide a formula kind of sameness for everyone.“ In addition, the employee’s bodies were suffering from long hours of sitting in one position. Propst concluded that office workers require both privacy and interaction, depending on which of their many duties they were performing.
Action offices, in short, were meant to provide a variety of environments and physical working positions, so people weren’t forced into a single space and position for the whole day. Which, it turns out, is really really bad for you. That’s not the history of office furniture we know, of course – all it quickly became was a cheap way of providing prefab desks and air circulation to shabby, beige and slightly greenishly-lit cubefarms furnished by the lowest bidder, because the invisible hand of the free market likes nothing better than flipping off the proles. But the idea, at least, had a lot of merit.
About three weeks ago, I switched to a standing desk. It’s this bolt-on model, and while I love it, it’s not perfect. My desk has an unfortunate amount of of flex to it, making the heavy Ergotron dingus a bit bouncy, but I’ve mostly addressed that that a bit by screwing in an extra table leg just under the bracket.
I love it. A lot. I don’t think I’m going to be able to go back to using an office chair.
What moved me to do this was two things. First: after poking around, the best information available suggests that spending ten or fifteen hours a day sitting is approximately as bad for you as smoking, and in a lot of ways worse. The other thing was that largely of curiosity I picked up a Jawbone Up wristband and, doubling down on the metrics tools, a Fitbit One*.
Whatever else those Quantified Life dongles claim, the one thing they can do very accurately is tell you how much time you spend doing nothing. And would you look at that, it turns out that I spend… nineteen hours or more of a typical day basically immobile. Um, that can’t be good. I’m going to have to do something about that.
During the first week. you really feel it. All those little muscles in my back that I really hadn’t been using, they expressed considerable displeasure at being suddenly called back into active duty, and understandably given the abusive relationship I’ve had with my knees, they’re were right there in line too. But sometime late in week two, that all settled right down. Even biking to work and lifting stuff around the house, back and knee pains I’ve had for years are going away, my posture is clearly getting better and that oh-god-it’s-painful-to-stand-up process I used to experience after uncoiling from an hour or four over hunched over a terminal just doesn’t happen anymore.
I feel unaccountably strong. I doubt I’m actually any stronger than I was a month ago, but I end my day feeling like I’ve put in a day of real work and I’m looking forward to the bike ride home, rather than feeling like I’m spent and I’ve got to drag my sorry ass across town again, and that’s not nothing.
I don’t know who’s got my chair at MoTo right now, and I don’t care. I think I’m pretty much done with it.