After a few years at a desk job, something happened that I didn’t think was possible: I got tired of sitting. I have a nice little cubicle and all, but I felt like I was developing a permanent bent shape from the amount of time I was spending in the chair. Here’s how my desk used to look:

Lucky me my company is really supportive of new and interesting things, so I got a lot of help setting up a standing workstation. Iteration one was just stacks and stacks of books. Here’s how it looked:

After a week or so, I added even more books under the monitors and some books under the keyboard as well. I rocked that setup for about a month. Once I was confident that it wasn’t just a phase I was going through, the IT guys with the tools came in and raised the entire desk:

It turns out that attaching the horizontal surface on the highest available setting on the cubicle walls ended up being perfect standing height. They found a monitor attachment for me that clamps onto the back of the desk and allows me to vary the height of the screens. I love the extra desk space it opens up underneath the monitors. And raising the desk opened up some extra storage space underneath it as well.

I thought I might get tired of standing, but really my back and legs just feel so much happier now. I pace around a lot more when I’m thinking about a problem, and I find that I walk around and talk with my officemates a bit more rather than just always sending emails. (My boss tells me this is a good thing.) The bottoms of my feet get tired by the end of the day, even with my comfy shoes, so I’m thinking of getting one of those gel mats to stand on. Even when I was really sore from running around all weekend, it felt great to be able to stand and shift and walk about when my legs were feeling stiff.

The only thing that remains really is to get a counter-height chair or stool just in case I sprain an ankle or something and really do need to sit for a while.

Sorry the pictures are kinda boring. They differences would probably be more clear if I was in the picture too or something. At least I remembered to take pictures at all…