Ergonomics For The Content Worker
First, a disclaimer: I’m not a doctor. Officially, I don’t know what the heck I’m talking about when it comes to health, pain, discomfort, and treatment or prevention options. Consult your physician if you experience pain or discomfort at work.
OK, that should cover it. Now, this is what I do not know and cannot advise you to do about it. The work can be demanding, but it shouldn’t produce injuries, you know? We’re not working with power tools or manipulating heavy objects. We don’t travel at high speeds while working. We’re not working in the ocean, or underground. We’re not exposed to toxic chemicals or radiation (as far as we know). Our daily commute ought to represent the riskiest part of our day. This is easy work, physically. At least, you’d think so.
So it’s a little odd to observe content workers wearing wrist braces, taking Advil all day, and complaining about back and neck pain. After experiencing a bit of this myself, I’ve establish a guideline I observe, strictly: If it hurts, something’s wrong. As soon as I feel some discomfort during or after work, I stop and think about it. Could this have been caused by some aspect of my work environment? How? What’s wrong?
In my experience, work-related pain virtually always originates from one of two causes: overuse and bad ergonomics.
Overuse is pretty easy to identify. If you spend significantly longer than usual doing one kind of task, you’ll probably experience some combination of stiffness and soreness in addition to the fatigue you would expect. If that’s all there is to it, you can manage it by taking a break; set that task aside for a day or two, and focus on other areas. If your work circumstances don’t permit taking a day or two off from that specific task, due to an impending deadline or something, then take lots of little breaks throughout the day. Lots of them. Your productivity will hardly suffer at all, but you can really ameliorate the negative impact of the overuse situation with some gentle stretching, some relaxation-oriented breathing exercises, and even just getting up and walking around a bit. You’d be amazed how much good this can do. In addition to (but not as a replacement for) frequent breaks, you might take moderate doses of your favorite anti-inflammatory or pain reliever. But only for short periods, and you MUST give yourself a break as soon as you can. A real break. Don’t spend all weekend sitting at the computer playing games, surfing the web, and chatting with your online buds. Shut that thing OFF and go for a walk!
But overuse isn’t really what I want to discuss today. I want to share some things I’ve learned about ergonomics. In my experience, it’s crucial that I set up my work space just right, or else I experience pain. Here are the things I configure carefully, and this is the order I do them in:
Seated position
Adjust your chair so that you can sit with your thighs parallel to the floor and your shins perpendicular to it. Your legs should form a nice right angle, square to the floor. Seat height is the most important adjustment, but we also want to make sure the seat tilt and the back are in a comfortable, neutral, square-to-the-floor position. You can adjust these throughout the day, but for setting things up, start with everything squared up. Sit up straight, but not stiffly; just adopt a natural, erect, seated position that you feel you could maintain for a long time without discomfort. Rest your forearms on your legs, just letting them sit there, with your upper arms hanging alongside your torso. Neutral. No effort required. If your chair has armrests, and they interfere with letting your upper arms hang naturally at your side, REMOVE THEM. I remove the armrests on virtually every chair I use. If I don’t, I will rest my weight on them while I work, which causes me to hunch my shoulders very slightly. The result: back and shoulder pain. Even after removing the armrests, it took more than six months for this pain to finally go away. You might fit your chair differently, but in my experience, if you touch the armrests at all while seated erect with your forearms resting on your thighs, those armrest have to go.
Keyboard and mouse height
This is the single most important adjustment, but you can’t set up keyboard height until you’ve got your seat adjusted, so do that first. If you have a height-adjustable desk and no keyboard tray, you will set desk height based upon keyboard position alone. If you’ve got one of those under-desk keyboard trays, you’ll have a bit more flexibility, but your mouse needs to be at the same height as the keyboard; if the mouse is on the desk, two or three inches higher than the keyboard, you’ll risk wrist injury when you use it. Back up from the desk and just sit in your chair, as described above. Rest your forearms on your legs, just letting them sit there, with your upper arms laying alongside your torso. Neutral. No effort required. Now lift your wrists straight up until your forearms are parallel to the ground. For me, this is only a couple of inches above my legs, but my arms are slightly long. This means that the desk surface has to be positioned literally on top of my thighs, and the gap between thighs and my fingertips is just enough for the desk and the keyboard. If your arms are shorter relative to your torso, you’ll want the desktop higher. If your arms are even longer than mine, relative to your torso, you may need an under-desk keyboard tray just to get the keyboard lower. Whatever you need to do to position the keyboard so that it sits right under your fingertips when your body is in this relaxed, neutral, square-to-the-floor position, DO IT! This is absolutely critical, if you intend to work at the computer thirty hours a week or more. The most common problem I observe is that the keyboard is too high, which causes hunched shoulders and pressure on the wrists.
Keyboard centering
Almost as important as keyboard/mouse height is keyboard centering. You can shift your chair, or you can shift your keyboard, but whatever it takes, get the keyboard centered directly in front of you. Your fingers should rest on the home row with your upper arms relaxed at your side, without any twisting of your body. Really, this is serious. No twisting. You can shift around in your chair all day long, if you like, but you need the neutral position to be truly neutral. Notice how your keyboard is not physically centered in front of you when the home row is centered. The editing and arrow keys, and the numeric keypad shift the home row quite a bit to the left. Center the home row on your body, not the keyboard’s physical case.
Monitor position
The guideline I learned was that the monitor should be centered in front of you, set up about 18 inches from your eyes, with the top of the viewable screen area (not the case) exactly at the height of your eyes. I use this guideline when I first set things up, but I find it’s not an exact science, unlike keyboard/mouse height. Try to set up your monitor the way I describe, but don’t worry about small variations of a couple of inches or less in height or distance. Centerline alignment is still critical, so do not compromise here. If you have to turn your head even a tiny bit to look at the monitor, your back and neck will not thank you for it. Often, especially if you’ve adjusted your desk so that it sits just above your thighs, you’ll need to find a way to raise the monitor off the desk. Whatever it takes, do it. The cheapest solution is to stack up reams of packaged printer paper, readily available in most offices, and set the monitor on that. Be sure you’re supporting the monitor’s base all around…it’s got to be stable, both to minimize bouncing and vibration (which can be hard on the eyes), and to prevent a fall…big CRT monitors are heavy! Once you’ve found the height you and your monitor require, you can get something more attractive, if you like. The goal is to keep your neck in a nice, neutral position with your head “floating” or “balanced” on the top of your spine.
Multiple monitors
But what about dual (or more) monitors? I love dual-monitors; it’s just great to be able to see twice as much at once, and use your eye/brain’s built in scan/tracking functionality to change from one window to another. But setting up dual monitors requires careful attention. Here is what works for me: Select your primary monitor, the one you’re going to use most (usually the larger or better monitor), and set it up exactly as I describe above. Most important, center it, as if there were no secondary monitor. Don’t center the pair, or split the difference, or shift the primary over a couple of inches to balance things. Center it. Then set up the secondary as close as you can to the primary, the same distance from your eyes, with the tops of the viewable screens aligned at the height of your eyes. If you had a third monitor, you would do the same thing on the other side. Close as possible, screen tops aligned. Yes, you need to turn your head to look at the secondary, but you’re always coming back to neutral. If you find yourself working for an extended period in a window displayed on the secondary, stop as soon as you realize this, and drag that window over to the primary monitor.
If you spend the time setting up your chair, keyboard/mouse, and monitor(s) as I suggest, you will probably be more comfortable, healthier, and happier at work. But before closing this topic, I want to share one more improvement you can make. It’s the hardest to implement, but I have found it unbelievably valuable. Here it is:
Learn to mouse left-handed
If you’re already left-handed, you’re in luck, because the keyboard appears to have been designed for lefthanders. “Whuh-huh?” I hear you saying. Look at it. It was actually designed for right-handers, with the keypad and editing/arrow keys on the strong-hand side. But wait…it was designed BEFORE the mouse became ubiquitous. And people set up their mice on their strong-hand side, naturally, since the mouse requires more dexterity to operate than a simple push-button key does. So now take a look at your desk, especially if you’re right-handed: there’s the keyboard, with the home row centered properly in front of your body. To the right, there are the editing/arrow keys. To the right of those, there is the numeric keypad. And to the right of that is your mouse. Yikes, that thing is way WAY over there. It’s not painful to reach that far, but…and this is the key…you wouldn’t want to do it all day long.
The compromise most right-handers make it to center their bodies on the keyboard case rather than the home row. This causes them to lean, twist, or otherwise shift slightly to rest their fingers on the home row, which creates a subtle but cumulative strain on wrists, shoulders, and back. Don’t underestimate the pain and stiffness this tiny out-of-alignment posture can create. You must center on the home row. Shifting the keyboard to the left doesn’t really bring the mouse that much closer, though. It doesn’t really solve the mouse position problem, but it does create new keyboard position problems. Right now while you’re reading this, try this: Lift up your mouse and put in on the left side of your keyboard. If your body is centered on the home row, as it should be, notice how symmetrical your desk looks now. There’s the home row, right in the middle, to the left, there is the mouse, very close at hand; your left hand can reach it without stretching or twisting your body. There are the editing keys and the numeric keypad on the right, also very close at hand; your right hand can reach them just as easily. That’s what I mean when I say the keyboard appears to have been designed for lefthanders.
As if all that weren’t enough, though, there is the fact that mousing can create injuries on its own, regardless of how ergonomic the mouse position is. Mousing can place the hand in an awkward position, with the moving wrist kept flat while two fingers remain extended over the buttons, or worse, with the index finger resting on the left mouse button and the middle finger off the less frequently used right button, lying along the right side of the mouse. This is what did it for me…pain right up between those two fingers, extending back to the wrist.
But never mind all that. You can still experience pain and stiffness in your right hand due simply to the fact that it’s asked to do so much: type and mouse. If you make frequent use of the editing and arrow keys or the numeric keypad, that only increases the demands on your poor abused right hand. All the time you’re mousing or keying numbers, your left hand gets to rest. If only there were a way to give your right hand a break, or to distribute your mouse and keyboard duties between your hands more equitably.
There is: learn to mouse left-handed. It took me about a week, and I am no paragon of dexterity, by any means. For the first day, you will feel clumsy, and it may even be uncomfortable due to the unfamiliar demands you’ll be placing on your left hand. This is the one time I’ll tell you to stick with it despite the discomfort. Keep going. Don’t change back when you get frustrated. Just let it take the time it’s going to take. Let yourself work at a slightly slower rate than you’re accustomed to. After three days or so, you’ll probably be reasonably effective with the basic operations like opening applications and documents. After a full week, you’ll probably be able to do almost everything, even selecting specific bits of small-font text; it will still feel awkward, but you’ll be able to do it. If you can get through the first week, you’re on the way; after that, sticking with it is easy. The fact that your right hand is feeling better helps a lot. By the end of the second week, the awkwardness will finally begin to recede, and you may not even think about it for the basic stuff; only the really precise mouse operations will call it to your attention. After a month, you’ll realize that you’re ambidextrous for mousing!
Experiment with different hand positions on the mouse. Here’s what works for me when I mouse left-handed: I do not swap button functions (which you can do with whatever mouse configuration software your system uses). I just place my index finger on the left mouse button and allow the entire mouse to sit “cock-eyed” in my hand, with the top of the mouse pointing toward 1 o’clock rather than 12 o’clock. I use my thumb to actuate the right mouse button. In the beginning, I used the mouse configuration software to reset “up” to the mouse’s 11 o’clock axis, rather than the default 12 o’clock. Now, I don’t even bother with that.
The great thing about using the mouse this way is that I can switch it from hand to hand without adjusting mouse configuration settings at all. I don’t often switch back to right-hand mousing, because I find that the demands placed upon my hands are very well balanced when I mouse left-handed. But if a guest sits at my computer, or for some other reason I know I’m going to spend an extended period of time on a mouse-intensive task, I can switch it over just by moving the mouse to the other side. This gives you a tremendous amount of flexibility when you start to experience wrist discomfort.
I hope you’ve gotten something of value out of my reflections on ergonomics. I urge you to try out some of these ideas on your own, even if you’re not experiencing any pain right now. If you have experienced chronic pain or discomfort in the past, consult with an ergonomics specialist in person. You may not even have to pay for this service; many large companies maintain an in-house ergonomicist. Even at smaller companies, the morale and productivity value this kind of consultation can create may be recognized, and the company may agree to hire an ergonomicist to visit your office and work with your entire team for a day.
Good luck!