How refusing to sit for two weeks taught me a thing or two about my health, my patience, and my productivity.

As a software engineer, I sit. A lot. During my last two academic quarters at RIT, I sat in class; I sat through presentations; most of all, I sat at my desk to write software and do homework (read: browse reddit). To add to this, my workload left me little to no time to go out and be active. Thus, I was spending the better portion of my life sitting.

Sitting isn’t healthy. There are numerous studies claiming that sitting reduces blood flow, weakens muscles, and promotes lower levels of general energy. So I decided to do something about it: I wasn’t going to sit anymore… well, not at my desk, at least.

One weekday evening, after I had returned to my apartment from class, and rather on a whim, I decided that I’d forgo this whole sitting thing for a while. Part of this may have had to do with the fact that I had clothes piled up on my desk chair, and I was growing tired of constantly shifting “the pile” from my chair to my bed and back each night, but for the sake of this story, let’s pretend that I was completely motivated to do this for the sake of science.

After pushing my chair/clothes holder to a corner of my room, I raised my dual 20″ widescreen monitors as high as they were capable of going, and tilted them up slightly to meet my gaze. It wasn’t perfect, and I had to look down upon them rather than straight ahead, but it would do.

Next, I raised my keyboard and mouse up using the absolute latest in object elevation technology: old textbooks. This brought them up to a usable hight such that I could type and click without bending my wrists in any terrible ways. After all, my goal wasn’t to trade bad circulation for carpal tunnel.

At this point I had a makeshift standing workstation. Not too bad, I thought. And so I began the journey of no longer sitting to do any of my computing. My roommates gave me three days at most before I’d crack and return begrudgingly to my large, soft, comfortable, reclining desk chair.

The first few days weren’t too bad, and I immediately began to see results:

• My feet hurt. As it turns out, standing in one place for a few hours straight puts a lot of pressure on one’s feet (who knew?), and this was the first thing to cause me trouble. The dull ache in my feet caused me to take frequent breaks to walk around my apartment, grab some coffee, converse with my roommates… anything that allowed me to walk rather than stand.
• My legs grew tired. All that standing was tiring, and I found myself unconsciously shifting my weight from one side to the other. This was probably terrible for my posture as well, since my back surely wasn’t straight or upright. Whether or not it was better than my usual sit-and-slouch posture, I’m not sure.
• My wrists felt funny. Even though I had elevated my mouse and keyboard to a position that felt comfortable to me, I probably didn’t do it 100% properly. Since my hands were still at somewhat of a downward angle, there was nothing to rest my wrists on, which also contributed to fatigue.

But despite all of these drawbacks, there were certainly a few benefits to my steadfast standing:

• I wanted to waste a whole lot less time on the Internet. The discomfort from standing for extended periods of time lent itself well to my desire to get things done quickly so I could go somewhere else and walk or sit (the couches in our apartment soon became sanctuaries). This was probably one of the biggest benefits of the entire setup, albeit probably not worth the cost of discomfort.
• When it got late and I became too tired to effectively continue working on something, I went to bed rather than try to stay up. This lead to more sleep (even with my severely limited sleep schedule at the time) and less unproductive awake time. It’s rather difficult to fall asleep at the computer while standing.

In the end, I made it a two full weeks before I finally decided I’d had enough. I semi-reluctantly returned my monitors and peripherals to their normal elevations and reconciled with my chair, who lovingly accepted me back without question, as if I’d never left.

The experiment taught me a couple very important things about myself and my work environment. For one, I’m out of shape. Really, truly, out of shape. And now that I’ve graduated and will actually have time for some of my favorite physical hobbies, I plan to change that.

Second, I realized that my work environment isn’t as strongly correlated to my productivity as I thought. Even though the standing workstation caused me to want to waste less time on the Internet, it wasn’t always the case that I actually did. Even while standing, the occasional breaks from work to peruse reddit or comment on people’s witty remarks on facebook were still essential to keeping my mind focused and on track.

I definitely want to try doing this again, although next time I’ll be sure to do it properly with mounted displays and an elevated desk. Then again, hopefully the future will bring us better HCI methods to a point such that workspace ergonomics become trivially simple. Until then, I’ll sit like it’s my job.