Category — Office Ergonomics

Most office workers know that sitting still in an office chair for 8 hours every day can have some pretty serious negative side effects.  Aside from the obvious ones, like bad circulation from lack of exercise, deteriorating mental focus, and the occasional desire to go jump off a bridge, many people (myself included) also develop some wacky posture as a result of excessive chair slouching.
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The tangle of cables and wires beneath my desk looks like a cluster of poisonous snakes. Doesn’t everyone’s? I have been searching for a clean, elegant, totally neat solution for years, but none of the ones I looked at seemed good enough for me to pull out my wallet and dig out a credit card.

That was until I stumbled upon Bluelounge’s SpaceStation, an organizer that can satisfy even me. (I’m a hard sell—an early adopter with lofty expectations.)

Space Station is perfect even for perfectionists. Especially those who use laptops as desktops when they’re home.

It takes up little space. In fact, it’s downright inconspicuous—and easy to clean around. It lays nearly as flat as your desk while still leaving enough space beneath to keep everything cool—in every sense. It has a cool design. (Funny, it doesn’t look like an organizer.)

It has room for USBs (ditch that hub!), iPods, scanners, printers, laptop connectors, cameras, and even paper. For just $79.95 each, it’s just what I’ve been waiting for. I’m glad I was patient.

It should come as no surprise to my readers that Ergonomics is a topic of great interest to me being as how this blog is about ways to improve your work happiness and productivity. Here is a brief definition I grabbed from Wikipedia:

Ergonomics (or human factors) is the application of scientific information concerning objects, systems and
environment for human use (definition adopted by the International Ergonomics Association in 2007).

The goal of ergonomics and human factors is to make the interaction of humans with machines as smooth as possible,
enhancing performance, reducing error, and increasing user satisfaction through comfort and aesthetics.

While most of the gadgets I post about are simply pre-existing products with a unique design twist, or added features, very few of them offer any significant benefit to the user through daily use. Thus, I decided it was time to reverse that trend and to start giving you guys something you can actually put in a request for at your job through the HR department (seriously!)

To start it off, here is a product a work associate recommended to me after I had complained about some pain in my right forearm after a long day of tedious mouse clicking. The Evoluent Vertical Mouse is designed for comfort and the promotion of neutral wrist and forearm posture, thereby eliminating the risk of pain conjured by resting your arm awkwardly on your desk while you click away your day. Although it certainly took me a while to get used to the different layout of the buttons, and the somewhat extreme sensitivity of the mouse, I definitely noticed less stiffness in my arm at the end of the day.  Although I was somewhat baffled at first over why there were 5 buttons, as opposed to the 3 I’m used to on a normal computer mouse, I eventually discovered that you can actually program them for different functions within various applications.

Office master recommended!