There are a few common mistakes that our risk assessment team encounter regularly:

• Using a wrong "handed" desk
• Desk incorrect height
• Desk wrong shape or size
• Desk legs, drawers or clutter restricting movement
• Desk top too small or cluttered
• Working at the dinning/coffee table or on your knee

Perform a quick risk assessment of your current working environment:

• Is there space for your legs under your desk?
• Can you change the position of your legs?
• Do edges or drawers cut into your thighs?
• Are your feet firmly on the floor (or do they dangle or do you have pressure behind your knee)?
• Can you support your forearms on the desktop?
• Do you have enough desk space for paperwork?
• Can your document holder be placed in front of the screen?
• Does your screen reflect light or glare from light walls/doors?
• Can you angle your tabletop to write or draw?
• Do you find sitting down uncomfortable?

Desk too low?	Desk too high?

The ideal solution would be an assessment of your work and space requirements and the selection of a suitable desk. Some of the tips below may help in the interim:

• Remove all the clutter from underneath your desk so that you can move your legs freely and change your position where YOU want to - not where you are restricted. Do you really need boxes and files there?
  
• Do you have a floor based socket/cabling box that restricts the movement of your chair? Your desk needs to be moved to a more suitable position.

"Sit at your desk and hold your arms straight in front of you, without leaning forward, keeping them straight. Now take them out to the sides - this is your COMFORT ZONE. Within this zone you should only have the items you use regularly, pens, phone, calendar etc. EVERYTHING else you should get up for (this includes files), give your body the opportunity to move, stretch and change position."

Height adjustable desking Why do chairs have so many adjustments? If you are long in the leg and your thighs are pressed against the desktop, you are liable to lean forward and down, this can result in poor back and neck posture. Height adjustable desks are the ideal solution and don’t have to be expensive. As an nterim solution you can raise the height of the desk with desk feet. However, you do not have great adjustability and there is a maximum that you can raise your desk in this manner. You should have your feet firmly on the floor. Ideally your desk would be height adjustable removing the need for a footrest

• Sitting too low can cause sustained contraction of the shoulder ‘lifting’ muscles, leading to muscle pain.
  
• If you are short in the leg and your feet don’t touch to floor easily, this can increase the strain on shoulder and arm muscles, and the common solution is to provide a footrest. This solution is fine for typing when you need to be higher to give the correct arm position, but some users have a further problem when they need to move from a PC area to a writing area and again cannot reach the floor. In this situation two foot rests of different heights would be required and this is not practical.
  
• Shoulder, upper back and neck problems will be exacerbated by lack of forearm support. A height adjustable desk will ensure you are getting support at the right level. Also make sure that your chair arms do not hit the desk edge (see Choosing a Chair). You may prefer to choose a desk that ensures you get good forearm support. Choose one from our range with cockpit cut outs or see products like the keyboard corners.

Desk Size and Shape

• Lots of desks are old in design and do not provide sufficient room for both computer use and writing/reading. Poor house-keeping can compound this! Sometimes the position of equipment on the desk, files, shelves, piles of paper, toys, CPUs etc can restrict how we use our desk. You may be experiencing shoulder/arm pain because you cannot place your mouse in the correct position or because the only space you have to write has drawers where your legs need to go.

"If you are right handed, choose a desk with a large writing area to the right of the corner PC area, the reverse if you are left handed. This will stop you twisting to one side to write."

Again the best solution is a new desk, designed to give you enough room to use the computer and to read/write, with no obstructions. You can create more room by removing the CPU from your desk, use monitor blocks or monitor arms instead and place the CPU on an adjacent desk or floor if you don’t need to access disk drives regularly.

Corner Desk Problems

We have seen lots of people who are using computers on desks with a return, placing the computer in the corner and balancing the keyboard across a right angled corner. Very often you cannot get your chair close enough to type without stretching your arms as the legs of the desk get in the way or the chair armrests hit the desk edge. A simple solution is our keyboard corner.

Tilting desk tops Tilting your work up towards you, reduces the need to look down and will allow you to use your chair back for support, improving posture and decreasing neck and shoulder pain. Some desks have built in tilting surfaces. For a smaller outlay you could try a writing slope that can be placed on top of your existing desk if you have sufficient room.

Narrow Desks

Can also mean that it is impossible to place a copyholder between screen and keyboard, this is the most suitable position for a copyholder
as it reduces the need to move the head and is in the line of vision. Solutions to this problem are a deeper desk, at least 80cm, or desk
extensions like the Keyboard corners.

Glare or Reflections

from windows, light walls or doors can lead to sore eyes, neck pain and headaches. You may need to change the position of your desk or monitor, which should be positioned parallel with to the window at 90º. Ensure you have the correct blinds fitted a special material can be used to reduce light. For more help with these symptoms also see the head and neck pain section in CONDITONS.

Once you have checked and corrected all these things there is one thing that will really change how you feel after sitting down at work all day – MOVEMENT. Your body thrives on variety, watch a child and they can’t sit still, this is because they are in tune with their bodies. We have been trained to suppress what our body tries to tell us, pain from work is a physical warning signal, we need to retrain ourselves in naturalness. Children don’t consciously assess what they do - they just do it, like the old joke says, BECAUSE IT FEELS GOOD!

(Images courtesy SIS International a/s)