My Cardboard Standing Desk
Standing desks are trending these days. At least I think they are. Having never worked in an office, I wouldn’t know. But my friends who do say “standing desk” with this vague arousal like people used to talk about getting an Uber. (Think “I took her to Dorsia” in American Psycho…)
I was intrigued. Soon I learned that Papa Hemingway did all his writing at a standing desk. I read there are potential health benefits — it turns out my seated writing was really a slow death sentence. That’s it, I had to get one.
But standing desks aren’t cheap. They start in the hundreds, with Gadget Review’s top pick coming at $1,300. That’s no good. What’s more, I’m currently living out of a backpack and have no fixed work spot.
The other day I built my own. It cost me nothing — if you don’t include the self consciousness sorting through a dumpster. It’s lightweight, portable, and adjustable.
Introducing the cardboard standing desk.
Here’s what I have to report on my first week writing vertically.
Standing Desks Are Easy to Find
Since I embraced the standing desk, I’ve been seeing them everywhere. Not the high end sort, but improvised ones like mine. The lunch-counter — facing out the window — at a cafe where I used to work at the tables, the folding table a the laundromat, and even the island in my kitchen.
All I need to do to adjust for varying heights is tilt my laptop’s screen. There’s a lot of talk out there about the optimal height for a standing desk. There’s even a height calculator. But close enough works fine. If the desk is too low, put a shoebox or a few books on it. If it’s too high, stand on something.
Focus, Charlie, Focus
I wasn’t made for writing. Growing up, if it required sitting still for any length of time, I couldn’t do it. The feeling of sitting at a desk was something like drowning, and for this reason I hated reading and I hated school. But most of all, I hated writing because teachers always told me I was good at it.
A decade out of high school, when I transitioned to writing full-time, a well meaning relative told me something like “It’s not going to work. You’re just like me, you can’t sit in a chair all day.”
So far I’ve made it work, but only by staying in motion when I’m not writing. I swim, I run, I lift, I hike, I free dive. As I write this, my face is a little tender from being slammed into a Jiu Jitsu mat.
But no matter how much nervous energy I get out of my system, the unpleasantness of the act of writing remains. One week in, my standing desk habit seems to have removed that feeling.
Standing up feels more active. I can move while I work. It feels like I could throw a solid punch into the screen or the blank page if things get frustrating enough, and maybe that’s why Hemingway wrote on his feet. I would pace when I worked sitting too, but that always came with an interruption. I still pace, I pace more, but it doesn’t throw me off the way getting up from a chair does.
The Health Debate… Meh
Standing desk advocates tend to focus on the health benefits. They see it as the office furniture equivalent of a super-food. And just like with superfoods, over-simplification and exaggeration of the benefits has invited skeptics, haters, and conflicting medical opinion.
Here are just a few articles from the case against writing upright:
- The Washington Post: it’s hard on your legs.
- Outside Magazine: Sitting is bad but more standing isn’t the solution. They recommend getting exercise at work and “sitting smarter.”
- Vault: You don’t need a standing desk.
To me, both sides of the health debate miss the point. Just like diet has more to it than caloric and nutritional needs, the design of a work environment isn’t all about spine and joint health.
A standing desk happens to work for me. My legs get tired eventually, but when they do, sitting feels how it’s supposed to: like a rest, not a default state.
Outside makes a good point, that there is no substitute for motion and exercise. That’s something health angle misses: it’s possible to get your posture right while you work and do everything else wrong, like buying a small diet coke with your large everything else.
I would recommend that everyone at least try working at a standing desk, but I wouldn’t recommend buying one. Half the fun is building or finding your own. I hear good things about ironing boards.
