Augusto says: Stand up!

My relationship with standing up and using a desk is as difficult and torrid as my relationship with a home office.

When home office doesn’t work

Since I learned that my home office is mostly a distracting place, I have been trying to avoid having one. It is because a home office works for me for some of the time and then begins to cause an incredible amount of interruptions, hence stops being a productive place. I have noticed that my home office is mostly a meeting place. I am there mostly to charge my electronic devices and have Skype and phone meetings. Otherwise I run away from that place.

Stand up and distract less

I love standing up when working at a desk. Trust me; it is much easier to avoid distractions when standing not sitting. But if you have no office, finding a good stand-up desk is quite a challenge. How have I coped with this problem? I found a portable stand-up option that can be folded and adjusted in so many ways that I can fix an office in any place, any time.

A loony in Starbucks

I got the magical desk on Amazon. It is called “FURINNO Adjustable Vented Laptop Table”. Basically, it is a portable bed tray with adjustable legs which allows me to work practically anywhere. The hardest part when using the equipment is the way people look at me when I place it on a Starbucks table with the iPad on top.

Increased productivity

The interesting thing is that since I started using my portable desk, my daily word count increased and I have much less trouble with getting focused. For some reason, my brain functions much better and faster when I use the stand-up desk than when I am sitting, regardless if it is comfortable or not.

Great stand-uppers

This is not my first approach to using a stand-up desk. Nor I am the first person to try this solution. Thomas Jefferson, Donald Rumsfeld, Sir Winston Churchill and Ernest Hemingway among other famous people did it in the past. I stopped using a stand-up desk for the first time when I moved to Indiana and resigned from a home office simply because there was no space for it in our new place.

Second desk — standing desk

I am also not new to having more than one place to work. I have travelled with just one bag for many years. I have been #iPadOnly for more than two years now. I totally agree with Mike St. Pierre who wrote about the need for a second desk (Productive! Magazine no. 11) and introduced me to the idea. Having read the article, I decided that the second desk should be a stand-up one.

How to keep focus

The trick of having more than one place to work is as effective as the idea of using two browsers. I work on Google Chrome and play on Apple Safari. The advantage is that after I trained my brain to do this, I would never open Facebook, twitter, RSS or any of those in Chrome = during the working time. Thanks to that, I can stay focused and work for longer periods of time.

In the same way, having more than one area to work allows me to complete a range of particular tasks and increase productivity. I usually write standing up, go to the home office for meetings and other kinds of work, and choose another place if I need to accomplish other kinds of duties. So far it has been working great.

Photo: Flickr / Alois Staudacher CC BY 2.0