Working from home? Here are five tips to stay comfortable (and stop slouching)

Sore neck, tired eyes, tense shoulders. All of these are sadly familiar to anyone who’s ever spent time slouched over their work desk staring into the dull light of a computer screen.

It’s one of the prices we pay for sedentary desk jobs, and something that offices have spent decades improving with better equipment and conditions. But now that burden has expanded beyond the cubicles at work and landed closer to home.

While it can feel nice to set up on your kitchen table or back verandah, it can cause problems for your back.Credit: iStock

The latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that 36 per cent of working Australians worked some part of their job from home, the equivalent of 5.2 million people setting up their up computer wherever they can.

It might be on the kitchen table after the breakfast plates have been cleared, a small desk in your child’s room amidst their toys, or – if you’re lucky – a spare room that you’ve been able to commandeer as a home office.

So how can you set it up so you can WFH properly? Jordan Lees, a workplace physiotherapist, has seen every type of possible desk, chair and screen combination.

As director of The Ergonomic Physio in Melbourne, he’s conducted more than 7500 workplace assessments in offices and homes, and while you might not always have control over the location, there are still things you can do to improve your WFH surroundings.

Everyone’s situation is as unique as their bodies, but making some of these small tweaks to your set-up can have a big impact on how you work.

The first tip is to adjust everything you can. “The number-one, biggest problem that I see in home offices is the height of the desk,” says Lees. The typical height of a standard office desk is 72cm, but many desks at home, like dining room tables, are usually 80 to 85cm, way too high for most people to comfortably work from.

Lees, who is 179cm tall, adjusts the height of his desk to 70cm. In an ideal world, you’d move a standard office desk into your home that you can raise higher or lower depending on your need, but that’s not always possible.

One way of compensating for this is with your chair. If you have an adjustable chair, you can use the combination of its height and an optional footrest (or even just a shoebox) to tailor it. You should aim for some back support, like a pillow, and for your elbows to have a rough 90-degree angle when you’re typing.

Surprisingly, Lees says there is a place for occasionally using a computer on your lap while sitting on the couch.Credit: iStock

Lees likes to set people up with a slight, five to 10 degrees, backwards recline. “If you’re leaning back slightly, you can’t lean forward; therefore you can’t slouch,” he says. Add an external keyboard and mouse so you can line up the top of your monitor at or slightly below your eye level, and everything should be feeling a lot more comfortable.

At this point, it’s helpful to understand that there are only two variables that will cause you to develop symptoms from your workstation: the set-up of your equipment and how long you are there for.

“My opinion is the time you’re in the workstation is equally, if not more important, than what the setup actually looks like or feels like,” says Lees.

He recommends you figure out what your ‘postural threshold’ is. This is how long you can stay in a position, sitting or standing, before you feel the need to change positions.

To achieve this, note the first time you start feeling any symptoms or discomfort when you’re working, which can be as simple as “my bum’s getting a bit sore from sitting down so long”, he says. Once you’ve determined what the threshold is for your own set-up, then you should move when you reach 75 per cent of that time.

To give you an example, if you can comfortably sit at your WFH desk for an hour before you start noticing that your neck starts to hurt a little, then that’s your postural threshold. You should therefore aim to change positions every 45 minutes, or 75 per cent of your one-hour limit.

Lastly, remember that working from home offers advantages than many offices don’t, like the lure of the comfy sofa in your living room that’s just begging for you to sit on it.

Somewhat surprisingly, Lees says there’s a place for occasionally using a computer on your lap while sitting on the couch – provided you don’t have any pain. Just keep notice of your postural threshold in that position, and enjoy one of the best benefits of WFH.

With 5.2 million Australians working from home, there are 5.2 million different ways of doing it. Everyone’s situation is as unique as their bodies, but making some of these small tweaks to your set-up can have a big impact on how you work.

Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com

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