The Most Valuable Piece of Equipment
Posted On: 2008-01-24
If I were to ask you what the most valuable piece of equipment might be for a webmaster to have what would you say?
I'm sure lots of you would want to nominate a good PC or a good laptop; others might think that a good WYSIWYG HTML editor might be the most important thing to have and those things certainly are important. However, I wonder how many would agree with me and list a good office chair as the most important piece of equipment that a webmaster could have?
Now before you laugh and think I'm off with the fairies and there's just no way that a chair could ever be that important stop and think about it for a while. Think about what things are impacted by a bad chair. Think about how uncomfortable you can be if the chair you're use is old and worn out, the wrong height, or broken. Think of how much that lack of comfort impacts on your productivity.
Those things you've just thought about are only the short-term impacts of a bad chair. Now let's think about the long-term impacts that a bad chair can have on you. If you're spending eight, ten or maybe even more hours a day sitting in a chair that just isn't suitable for you then you are doing long-term damage to your body.
You may not notice it at first but every day you sit in that chair your body is suffering and sooner or later you will begin to feel the affects. You will develop repetitive strain injuries in your hands, wrists and arms and you will develop back problems that will never go away.
So what makes for a good chair? Well obviously good back support is important and a comfortable cushion is also important. A chair with adjustable height is another important factor and having arms on the chair is ok ... just so long as they don't get in the way of your elbows and change the angle of your arms.
You see, having a good chair is only the start ... how you actually sit in the chair when you are using your keyboard is also very very important too.
The Correct Position
You should be able to sit in the chair with your feet firmly on the floor and the angle between your thigh and the lower half of your leg should be 90 degrees at the knee. It should certainly not be tighter than 90 degrees nor should it be any wider than 90 degrees either.
Your arms should be parallel to the top of you desk and the keyboard should be raised using those two folding legs that so many computer users seem to ignore. The angle at the elbow can be a little more than 90 degrees but certainly not less.
Your back should be straight and perpendicular to the floor. That means that the angle at your hips should also be around 90 degrees.
Now all that's fine if you're an average height but if you're tall ... or you have long arms ... then getting those angles right can be a problem. Steve is both tall and has long arms and he has to do some fiddling to get all those angles right.
Recently we bought a new office chair for his office but the height was just a fraction too low and he couldn't get comfortable ... so he used the pieces from the new chair to replace some of the worn pieces in the old one. He has even gone as far as to place some extra padding under his keyboards to bring them up to the right height so that his arms are parallel with the top of the desk.
Before he did that he found that pain was beginning to develop in his shoulders and arms so don't think that something as minor as the height of the keyboard is unimportant. And while we're thinking about positioning your body and your keyboard think about your mouse too. It should be close to you and you should not have to stretch your arm out to use it.
So that's why I think that your office chair is perhaps the most important piece of equipment that a Webmaster can have. However, don't think that you need to spend a lot of money on the right type of office chair.
You don't have to spend much time looking before you'll see that the price of office chairs varies considerably and there are some very expensive chairs on the market but a high price does not always indicate the best chair for you. Steve's chair is a $99.00 special from our equivalent of Office Depot.
All you need is a chair that is comfortable to sit in and allows you to correctly position yourself at the keyboard and you'll be right to work long and hard for years to come.