Tufts Blogs

I got a standing desk this year and it has made an overall better human being.

Motivation

I had an awesome job this summer, but a 21 year old shouldn’t be complaining about lower back pain. Also, I normally have to change focus every hour or two but this was ridiculous. I normally attribute that to not being interested in the material, but my project was bomb and I still couldn’t work for more than two hours straight.

Opportunity

I moved into an off-campus house for the first time this summer, which means I needed furniture. I got a couple of black wire shelves and put boxes on them to store all my clothes and stuff (I could do a long post on my organization system, but I’ll save it for another time). I’m aesthetically picky enough that I wanted my desk to match the look. I had never met a traditional sitting desk that made me think, “wow, I could work here all day”.

The Leap

Standing desk! I figured I’d go for it, if it was horrible, I could just turn it back into a shelf. Rather than spring for one of the ridiculous, adjustable, $1000 convertible desks, I got this:

Biggest hurdle: the shelves have holes. Large ones. Luckily, as long as I place my pens diagonally, they don’t fall through.

Accessories

Highly necessary accessories include the anti-fatigue mat (two and a half inches of cushy goodness under my feet), the headphone hook (an S-hook I found on the street keeps my headphones off the surface but in easy reach) and the external monitor (stacked on top of a couple of old textbooks [#college] puts it at the perfect height so I don’t throw my neck out of whack).

This is 100% how I "work" at the desk.

Outcome

The desk has totally changed my life. I normally wake up early, but now I actually get stuff done in the three hours before class. I’m less antsy when I have to sit down throughout the day, and I can fall asleep more easily even when I haven’t left the house all day because my pent-up energy gets wiggled out. When it’s crunch time, I can focus for more than two hours. True testimonial:

All hail the standing desk. Making a 10-hour work day not suck.

— Marcella Hastings (@marsella_h) December 12, 2014

Comment if you want me to take a picture of the set-up when I get back to campus in January!