Standing Desks

Every now and then you stumble upon something and then it pops up everywhere. A particular car model, Laksa, scripts involving yoga, all recent culprits...

I do the occasional Standing Desk Day. I have an L-shaped desk. One half low and the other half high. The high side is the perfect height for working while I am standing up.

And then you discover all sorts of people do this, there’s Walter Murch, the film editor who cuts standing up. Back in the day, editors had to get up and shift bins around, lift down cans and spool film, and more often than not, cut on their feet. Now he’s the most prominent editor using Final Cut and he’s still upright. I can see how it returns a free-flowing physicality to the experience of editing digitally.

Our Sound Designer, Lars Ginzel, also works standing up. Somehow it came as no surprise that Donald Rumsfeld, too, has a standing desk...

For me, standing up aids focussed work. It’s an attitude thing.

First and foremost, the Internet isn’t half as appealing when you’re upright. You might check something or download a file, but there’s no way in heck you’ll surf. Man, I’m standing up, I’ve got work to do.

Being already upright, moving around and getting files out of drawers and so on is not so difficult. It’s a great approach when you’re in a crunch and you have to get a package out the door, compiling a document from here and there.

It also works with how I think best, pounding the floor back and forth, scribbling notes on walls and talking to myself.

And I never sit down while on the phone, I walk endlessly.

I have to say, I like what it does to me and how I work, my attitude shifts, I’m much more productive.

The other half of any desk is the chair. Somewhere there must be the ideal high stool, so if I needed to sit occasionally because say, my feet hurt, I could.

My current chair is the antithesis of what I need. It excels in getting me horizontal. If I tilt it back, it’s a perfect for Pzizz, with a set of good headphones and my feet up...




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