Top 4 Ways to Hack Your Office
If you spend countless hours hunched over your desk, we don’t need to tell you how easily your office can turn from a place of productivity into one of discomfort and pain. And yet your bosses probably aren’t going to write a Hermann Miller chair into the budget anytime soon, nor a weekly massage.
What can you do? Why, put your hacking cap on, of course. With just a few affordable products, some of them specifically designed for ergonomics — others already lying around the storage room — there are many ways you can adjust your workspace to fit you — and have a little creative fun along the way. Here are our top 4 tips to hack your office to ergonomic health.
1. Hack Your Chair With Decorative Throw Pillows.
Cheaper office chairs should still provide you with the height adjustments and arm support needed to keep your shoulders supported when you’re resting and your feet flat on the ground. However, most will do a terrible job of providing lumbar support, curving inward rather than outward. Unless you’re a debutante trained in ancient finishing schools, this makes hunching far too easy, resulting in a curving of the spine.
This can be easily fixed with an inexpensive lumbar support cushion or by placing small pillows beneath the base of your spine to ease you into an upright position. The pillows come with the added benefit of looking great, which just might inspire you to hack your chair for style as well with a fun reupholstering job. Hey, why not? A stylish office is much more fun for wiling away those office hours.
2. Make Your Own Keyboard Shelf
Ideally, when you type your hands should float naturally over your keyboard. Adjusting your heavy desk to find that perfect height can be difficult, all the more so if you lack a keyboard tray. That said, you can easily make your own with an Ikea book shelf.
And while you’re at it, make sure to swap your regular old keyboard or laptop keyboard for a split ergonomic keyboard. These are highly effective and relatively inexpensive, and you’ll save both your company and yourself a lot of money and pain in preventing Repetitive Stress Injuries (RSIs).
3. Build the World’s Most Cost Effective Stand Up Desk
Over the past year or so, a number of studies have linked a host of problems to the sitting we do throughout the day, including diabetes and obesity. But stand up desks, just like those fancy chairs, come with a heft price tag. No worries—just stack your monitor, keyboard and mouse on books or milk crates, and voila! You’ve made your very own standing desk. Alternatively, if you’ve got a sturdy wall, two simple Ikea bookshelves will also do you right.
4. Ward Off Eye Strain With a Laptop Stand
Staring at a glaring screen for eight hours a day puts a lot of strain on your eyes, and hunching over a laptop is enough to send your shoulder muscles into spasms. But you can easily turn your laptop into an adjustable monitor with a laptop stand, which will allow you to raise and lower your laptop to the ideal height.
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Have you hacked your office in any particularly creative ways? Let us know in the comments below.
