This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall.

Like Elton John, I'm still standing—at my desk, that is—and I love it. If I had an extra five grand laying around, I'd buy one of these swanky 2MPH "sit-to-walkstation" treadmill desks, too.

Last Monday I adjusted my desk to standing height (pictured right). I spent the week working on my feet, and I'm never going back to a sitdown desk again. Here are some questions and answers about the change.

What made you switch to a standing desk?

Ever since I wrote about a "treadputer" treadmill desk at Lifehacker in May of 2006, I've been curious about and inspired by alternative desk setups. My workday—which consists almost entirely of typing on or talking into a computer—is completely sedentary, and is a big part of the reason I'm more than 20 pounds overweight. Burning more calories while I work is a better use of that time.

Building or buying a treadputer is too expensive an undertaking for something I'm not sure I'll like or even have the space to accomodate. A standing desk, however, is doable. In July of 2010 I featured an Ikea Jerker treadmill desk, and mentioned I might just adjust my Jerker to standing height. This has been something I've been thinking about a long time.

Three straws finally broke the camel's back. First, I'm using RescueTime to monitor how I spend my time on my computer, and the weekly report made me realize how many hours I really do spend sitting down (week before last: 48). Second, I'm actively working on losing weight right now, and this seemed like a small way to add to the effort (down 12 pounds in 3 months so far). Finally, Macworld posted a guide to setting up a treadmill desk, and unequivocally recommended that you go from sitting to standing to walking, not straight from sitting to walking. That did it.

Why use a standing desk?

Two reasons: Higher calorie burn and better posture. When I'm sitting at my desk, even in a fancy ergonomic chair, I tend to slump, with my back curved and shoulders forward, which closes my chest and makes my breathing more shallow. When standing at a desk where my forearms are at a 90 degree angle on the desk surface, my shoulders go back, which makes my spine concave and opens my chest. Besides the initial foot pain and muscle aches of engaged thighs and calves, it feels great.

I didn't discuss the switch to a standing desk with my doctor, though there have been some studies about the negative health effects of excessive sitting. I'm not a medical professional, but it seems obvious that human beings aren't meant to spend 45 hours a week sitting still in a chair. Now that I'm standing, I pace, dance, and fidget a lot more freely, which is just more natural activity and calorie burn built into my day.

But don't your feet hurt?

Yes, very much. In fact, the first three days were brutal, so painful I doubted the whole endeavor. By mid-day 2, I had to sit down every hour or so. I was distracted and had a hard time focusing on anything but how much my feet hurt. At night I sat on the couch with my feet elevated. I collapsed into bed totally exhausted. I never appreciated sitting as much as I did the first three days.

Then, on the fourth day, it wasn't so bad. On day 5, I got lost in work for 2 hours before I thought about the fact that I was on my feet once. Now it's my new normal.

How did you convert your desk to a standing desk?

I have a (sadly discontinued) Ikea Jerker desk, which is designed to let you set the table to any height you want when you assemble it. So, I put in the 3 hours it took to break down my whole computer setup, disassemble the desk, and put it together at standing height. I don't have a lot of willpower, so I wanted to make the change difficult to undo. Adjusting the desk back down to sitting height will take another half-day of tooling with Ikea furniture, not something I'll want to do again any time soon. Besides, if I want to sit, I always have the dining room table. Here's what my new setup looks like:

If you don't have a desk that you can assemble to standing height, you can always create a temporary standing desk by putting shelves on your current desk.

Or you can use Coke cans, like Marco did:

Or you can use printer paper, like tbone7770 did:

Or you can just buy a standing desk.

What about those treadputers?

They're cool, aren't they? I'm not sure if I'll ever actually make it to the point where I'm walking and computing all day. I'm going to put in several months of standing before I consider it.

What shoes do you wear?

I wear ordinary running shoes, which are fairly new, well-padded and supportive. Changing your shoes seems to help the feet, too. Sometimes I go barefoot, but I don't usually last long.

Do you stand on a soft mat? If so, which one?

Not yet, but I've ordered a squishy mat to put under my desk. It's not one of those fancy $100 kitchen gel mats, it's more like a $17 cash register/factory mat. It arrives this week. I'll let you know how well I like it.

Week 2 update: Received the mat, and can confirm it makes working barefoot or in flat shoes like Chucks easier. I've also introduced a footrest, which is nice for shifting your weight from foot to foot. I'm using an old box of unsold books for that.

Did you use any other gear in your switch to standing?

I bought a $20 monitor riser to get my screen to the right height so I'm looking straight ahead at it, not down.

How long did it take you to get used to standing all day?

I'm not entirely used to it yet, but I'm through the worst. I started Monday. By Friday I felt comfortable. Monday through Wednesday were pretty tough, though.

Do you take sit-down breaks?

Yup. I sit down at lunchtime, on phonecalls (though I'm more apt to pace), at meetings, and maybe once or twice for 5-10 minutes at other times in the day, as needed. One day I was pretty exhausted and achy so I treated myself to a sitdown beverage at the coffee shop, which was a double treat. But for the most part, I'm not even thinking about it any more.

Update: Several people have pointed out that there are health risks associated with too much standing, like varicose veins. There's usually some health effect associated with too much of anything. I don't stand ALL the time now—I sit, stand, pace, and stretch. The difference between now and before is that I used to mostly sit. Now I mostly stand.

Who else uses a standing desk?

More people than I'd realized, especially techies! Former Twitter developer and founder of BankSimple Alex Payne. Creator of Instapaper Marco Arment. Podcaster extraordinaire Dan Benjamin. Novelist Philip Roth. Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Lifehacker editor Jason Fitzpatrick. Now, newly, my fellow San Diego techie Mitch Wagner. Who else?

Any more questions re: the standing desk? Post 'em in the comments.

Week 2 update: Weighed in at the end of week 2 of standing desk plus eating well, and I'm down 3 pounds—no gym, just standing and doing my regular walking about town. Pretty happy about these results so far.

Paying attention, for long periods of time, is a form of endurance athleticism. Like running a marathon, it requires practice and training to get the most out of it. It is as much Twitter’s fault that you have a short attention span as it is your closet’s fault it doesn’t have any running shoes in it. If you want the ability to focus on things for a long period of time, you need attention fitness.

Clay raises his attention fitness level several ways: by using a timer for work sprints (this works; I do it), by ditching his second monitor and stashing apps like Twitter and email in a separate virtual desktop that he hides while he works, by keeping his browser tab count down to a minimum, and by listening to lyric-free music. He's also looking into a standing desk. Test out your attention fitness level by seeing if you can read his post in its entirety--it's lengthy but full of interesting material that supports his approach.
How to Focus [InfoVegan.com]

Coding while walking works fine for me. As far as the mechanics, it's not hard to walk and type at the same time. 2MPH isn't very fast. I can't draw with the mouse while walking, so the occasional graphics work has to be done standing. Mentally, the consistent motion sometimes helps with flow, sometimes not. It's hard to tell, but switching between walking and standing seems to be enough for me to support the various required mental states. I've been doing this for about two months now, and while I have no hard data, I've done what I consider to be some of my best and most creative work ever in the last two weeks, so worst-case the walking isn't too great an obstacle to my coding. And this is indeed a huge improvement for my back over both sitting and standing.

I pace while I think, so this whole walking-while-typing thing is something I'd love to try. For now, I may just adjust my Jerker tabletop to standing position, and try that for awhile, before making the treadmill investment.
My Treadmill Desk [Hacker News]

My first post published yesterday on how to organize your workspace for maximum productivity. Having moved three times in the past four years, this has become my mental checklist when reassembling my desk.

I'm still finding my legs and meeting the audience over at Work Smarter, but I'm thrilled to be hanging out with the brilliant folks there, at least virtually.

(Please note: Actual Harvard University admissions people would laugh out loud if I'd applied there at any point in my academic career, so thanks to HarvardBusiness.org for letting me have a taste of the Ivy League fantasy.)

I got inspired by Lifehacker posts about both GeekTool and todo.txt and decided to start using it myself.

I found that outputting the whole todo.txt to the desktop became a bit messy. I also wanted to display other info like weather, system info and iTunes info, and the to-do list was taking up too much room and was hard to make "look good." My solution is pretty simple. I still have my major todo.txt and then another file @today.txt which I set up each night or morning and fill it with stuff that I must get done the next/that day. This makes the whole process of actually doing to-do's easier instead of just creating them and hiding from them/being overwhelmed. This also produced a very trimmed-down list which didn't clutter up my desktop with a ton of text. I used birdseye.py and modified the scripts(along with your todo.sh) so that they would display in the ways I wanted.

Not only did I want the information to be displayed on the desktop but I also wanted it to look good. The font used is weight variations of Aller and Aller display except for the calendar in the bottom right as I needed a monospaced font for this so it all lines up.

Before embarking on this project I knew nothing of the command line and Terminal or shell scripts, and coming out the other end I learned a ton.

Nice job, Grant. If you want to learn more about setting up GeekTool on your Mac, check out my full writeup, Monitor your Mac and more with GeekTool. To get the calendar Grant and I am using, here's the command you need.

The idea being, to create an office that will turn our clients into brand advocates, by using the most Nothing-building material we could find. At the same time, have the walls double as a blank canvas, on which people can leave their mark.

Here are a few photos of the cubicles and cool drawings:

This reminds me of Aza Raskin's neat Bloxes product, the modular cardboard building blocks that let you create dividers, walls, and even (big and unwieldy but fun) chairs. Also, whiteboard paint and Chris Martin's piano scribblings.

Check out the Nothing web site for more on their setup. Via CR blog, tx JF.