RSI is not something that most sufferers ever fully recover from. Once it happens, that’s when people start taking their ergonomics seriously, but that’s usually too late. RSI is like a Pandora’s Box: once its there, you’re looking at a lifetime of somewhere between mild discomfort and daily pain, depending on your case.

My Story

One day in 2004, a colleague of mine, a developer decided to get angry at his keyboard (or perhaps Windows!) and hammered the delete key in a repetitive manner a few hundred times. The next day, he’d lost the use of his left hand. He has never really recovered; good job he’s no longer a developer!

This put our office under extreme pressure for months. We couldn’t easily buy in help, and I took up most of the slack. Years of poor posture/ergonomics, plus a few months of stressful, additional workload resulted in constant pain in my hands, arms, shoulders, and neck. Many days I couldn’t manage to work at all.

To this day the tension has never been fully alleviated, although I did learn a lot along the way about how to cope. I took up hot yoga, tried physiotherapy, received regular sports massage, and changed how I work. Fortunately, I’m not coding much any more.

Let’s take some day to day examples: some do’s, some don’ts!

Posture

Legs Crossed at Desk

Here’s someone with his legs crossed under the desk, a big no-no. Good posture requires that the weight of your body is evenly distributed.

Sitting up straight, close to the desk, with a slight tilt backwards is the ideal. Feet should be flat on the floor with legs at 90 degrees. This often requires chair and desk adjustment in tandem.

Position

Laptop Use

Here’s something we see often at The Werks, laptop jockeys looking down. This is no good for your back and neck, the top of the monitor should be level with your eyes.

Laptop Stand

Here’s a quick, cheap improvement: using a laptop stand to raise it up.

Keyboard And Mouse Too Far Away

Here’s an example of the keyboard and mouse being too far away. Eyes are at roughly the correct height, but there’s a stretch to reach the mouse and keyboard.

Elbows should be tucked in to the body, roughly level with the desk, and there should be minimal reaching to use the keyboard or mouse.

Equipment

If you think about it, the typical keyboard and mouse arrangement is extremely unnatural for our hands: the ideal position is more like wielding an axe, rather than laying your hands down flat.

Split Keyboard And Tablet

That’s why I use a split keyboard to soften the angle that my hands work at, and a pen tablet instead of a mouse. Split keyboards are expensive: a cheap alternative is the Microsoft ergonomic keyboard. Pen tablets can be had for around £50, but are harder work to adjust to.

Chairs are a very important, potentially expensive investment, but also a very personal thing. I find arms restrictive, but they are recommended. I’ve tried the big daddy of ergonomics (the Herman Miller Aeron chair) but I found that I felt too far back in the seat (although it is very comfy for most people). I’d recommend trying as many chairs as possible, and making sure the lower back is supported.

Software

One of the main problems we tend to suffer from is the sedentary nature of our desk work.

I use software that forces me to take a break every 40 minutes. Some have a really hard time adjusting to this, but in the long run I’ve found that my concentration improved with regular screen breaks. I think this helps you see the wood from the trees.

Incidentally: some of the best known, innovative design firms in the world (Ideo, Adaptive Path) try to spend as little time at the computer as possible – being constrained by the desk and screen is seen as inhibiting creativity.

For Windows or Linux try Workrave, for OSX try Anti-RSI.

Hope you’ve found this useful: I wish someone had gotten me to take it seriously before I was in a lot of pain. The costs are nothing if you consider the long term implications.

Special thanks to those who I’ve used as examples!

My personal productivity struggle has been songwriting. I don’t have much time in the day for it, but even 5 minutes can sometimes produce interesting results. Now that I’m rather short of time, I’ve been thinking of ways to use Jerry’s method to make sure I at least do some kind of writing every day.

Today, in about half an hour I hacked something together. I don’t have space for a wall calendar, but I do have some basic php skills and I use google calendar. I took a php application called icalendar and set it to import a new google calendar I created called ‘music’.

Now every day that I do some songwriting, I will put an ‘all day’ event into the music calendar, which will show up in icalendar’s year view (with a mild bit of template hacking). There’s a red dot on each day I manage to get something down.

Clearly, there’s not much to see yet (see below) but I’ll set the calendar as my home page as a daily reinforcement and see how it goes! I thought it was important to see the whole year view, hence my desire to see it in something other than google calendar.

Additionally, I know that my GTD has definitely been slipping. I liked the idea of trying something a bit more action driven: tying in a nag system with target dates for tasks might be just the trick (which is what AMO does).

So I’ve been trying in for a couple of months now, and its been an agnostic experience: plenty of WIN, plenty of FAIL. I’ll start with the FAIL, so that we end on an optimistic note.

The FAIL

• Buggy as HELL! Tasks not being added when I pressed ‘add’, same for projects. Very frustrating at first.
• Preferences not being saved. My oh my, do I not need US style dates, very confusing. But the app ignored my chosen date format, over and over again (same for timezone). Support were responsive, but didn’t actually fix anything as far as I can tell.
• Discussions: I would not feel remotely comfortable collaborating with a client using it. The discussion feature is badly presented, and although you can get emails when someone starts a discussion, generally you don’t. This is REALLY important when you are dealing with people who don’t know ways other than email to converse, and aren’t really sold (yet) on the concept of using a project tool online. The system should email the recipient all the time by default.
• It utilises a facebook style notification popup (little red icon) for things it wants to remind me about: potentially useful. Problem being, the notifications were generally fairly useless, e.g. ‘Do you want to share that project that you just added’? Well, no. That’s a pretty low priority and if I wanted to do that, I would. Its the hidden/forgotten stuff that’s more important (e.g. ‘you haven’t touched that task/project for weeks!’)

The WIN

• Task reminders are more proactive than good ole basecamp, the system reminds me by email summaries about what I haven’t done
• I can tie in task deadlines to project dates
• I can delegate tasks (with nags) much more easily
• I can set up ‘mini projects’ much more easily than other systems – there’s nothing heavy about adding a project (unlike basecamp)
• iphone app! Joy of joys, a project tool that allows me to review/add tasks (or ‘action steps’ as the app calls it) while I’m away from my desk.

The Dilemma

As noted in my previous article, I generally find most online tools to be overpriced: the owners are overvaluing what they’re offering, and I’m buying too many of these different hosted services to pay what they’re asking.

This is yet again true of Action Method Online, with a special twist. Despite the awful drawbacks, I want to carry on using it, as I know its early days for them. But…. I’ve hit the limit on tasks on the free account, and I don’t wish to pay what they’re asking ($12 p/m or $99 p/a) given the drawbacks/exchange rate.

What should I do? Any ideas? Suggestions please!