In Ernest’s room there was a large desk covered with stacks of letters, magazines, and newspaper clippings, a small sack of carnivores’ teeth, two unwound clocks, shoehorns, an unfilled pen in an onyx holder, a wood carved zebra, wart hog, rhino and lion in single file, and a wide-assortment of souvenirs, mementos and good luck charms. He never worked at the desk. Instead, he used a stand up work place he had fashioned out of a bookcase near his bed.His portable typewriter was snugged in there and papers were spread along the top of the bookcase on either side of it. He used a reading board for longhand writing – Extract from Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir, AE Hotchner
For the past couple of weeks, I had been reading and posting up a lot about the whole standing workspace movement and all its benefits (which I’ll list shortly). So I decided to stop being the preacher who doesn’t practice what he preaches- and I tried it last night.
I elevated my tiny chair onto my evenly tiny desk and laid my netbook on it coupled with my journal and some stationary. My workspace is usually tied-down in that the speakers, mouse and power cables are duck-taped onto the desk so as to decrease clutter and to make things… a bit less movable? Overall, I was still able to play some tunes out of my tiny speakers beneath the chair- this was great.
The experience kind of seemed a bit intense at the beginning because from what I had read;I was in for some excruciating foot torture. But my experience was totally contrary to this. It felt as though I was at the gym but my body wasn’t complaining too much and my mind just felt intensely engaged. I felt so ALIVE!
Before last night, I never could make it past the 2-hour sitting mark without falling off to sleep. Last night, I was up from 19h30 till 23h30!!! That’s 4-hours of standing and moving around being uber, sipping on some coffee while typing away at the venomous keys and conjuring up major creativity! It felt amazing.
This “way of working” is actually a much healthier way of getting things done as oppose to the traditional desk and chair workspace. It improves your posture, keeps you awake and it increases your heart rate which will help you burn more calories. Yes, working this way could help you lose all that extra flab.
The value of this practice has been apparent to many great men of the past:
Thomas Jefferson is one of the most famous users of the standing desk workspace. His six-legged “tall desk” had an adjustable slanted top that was big enough to place a folio. On this desk, Thomas Jefferson drew up brilliant architectural blueprints for buildings like the Virginia State Capitol.
Winston Churchill also an avid user of the standing-desk. He often laid out the gallery proofs of is next book on a standing desk studied them carefully, looking around to make corrections.
As an entrepreneur or anyone else trying to strive towards a progressive goal amidst a cloud of doubt and old habits, the last thing you need is yet another reason to not do any work today. The chair was that, for me. I became lazy after some time spent sitting down and that allowed for my mind to space out into the unknown (NSFW blogs and funny YouTube videos) no matter how much work I had to do. This mundane element of my working regime was causing me to even create false measures of productivity, like overconsuming knowledge as opposed to putting it into practice (all those “How to…” articles).
Tonight is my second night on my feet.
I’ll give an update after I’ve completed a month working this way
So Far, Sooo Goood.
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