20 Oct Are you suffering from Laptop Lean?
Working from home during the week?
Yep, me too. Working from home can be great, you get to work with minimal distractions, cut out travel time, you don’t have to get dressed up and you often end up doing more work than normal to justify being allowed to work from home.
While most of us take our posture and workstation set up very seriously in the office, the same often doesn’t apply when we work at home.
Most people end up:
* working from a high dining room table
* sit on a chair with little or no support
* bring our laptop home
* spend long hours with very poor posture
Laptop lean is one of the biggest killers of good posture. If you have the laptop too close to you so the keyboard is well positioned, the screen can be hard to see and your neck will get sore quickly.
So most of us will move the laptop forward, lean forward off our chair, rest on our forearms and angle our neck down to look at the screen – just like in the image above. All classic symptoms of Laptop Lean.
Laptop Lean can cause soreness in your neck, shoulders and back, and even in your forearms and hands which are now supporting part of your weight.
Who would have thought there were things to worry about when working from home, other than too many trips to the fridge.
The good news is, you can put a stop to this immediately. Let’s start to treat your workplace at home seriously and look after your body.
So here’s your prescription:
* invest in a high quality ergonomic chair. This should be tax deductible, and will be one of the best investments you make.
* Set your monitor at the right height – you can use an external monitor, or your laptop with an external keyboard
* consider using a foot rest where applicable
Have a friend or family member take a photo of you while you work so you can see how your posture looks.
Our workstation set up guide is a great visual aid to help you get this right.
https://greencubechairs.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Green-Cube-office-ergonomics.pdf
And if you need any assistance, please remember we’re here to help. We can visit you on site or you can send through your photo of your home office and we’ll go from there.
Enjoy working from home, and look after yourself.
Daniel
Posted at 02:09h, 18 NovemberSome great points, I’m guilty of many of these and it became an issue as I spent more time working from home. Nice to put some focus on our ‘flexible workstations’.
Emma Jasmine
Posted at 13:05h, 20 Januaryhey there!
Tom McConville
Posted at 11:08h, 23 JanuaryThanks for the article. We have a flexible work force and noted a big improvement once we took your advice on board and introduced some external monitors for our team who use laptops.