Home Office Comfort

Suffering through wrist pain using a mouse kills productivity. The sooner you can identify the source of the pain, the faster you can put a fix in place. Repeating the same motions with the same ligaments is a cause of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. The pain can subside, but without addressing … Read more

A padded rest to support your wrist at the desk should be one of the more straightforward ergonomic desk accessories. Without knowing how to use computer wrist rests properly though, it could do more harm than good.  A computer wrist rest is usually considered when discomfort shows up during or after typing or using the … Read more

Stirring a cup of tea. Scrolling your phone. Pressing the remote. Simple things — until your hand or wrist starts to ache. After long hours using a computer mouse, that discomfort can be a sign of mouse repetitive strain injury, and it doesn’t always switch off when the workday ends. Common advice is to rest. … Read more

Wrist discomfort from mousing usually shows up away from the desk — scrolling on your phone, reaching for the remote, hands on your lap during a break. The best mouse pad with wrist support shouldn’t flatten out on you. But that depends on how you use it.  It’s surprising how the little things on your … Read more

Lose the number pad on a keyboard and the size is reduced by 15-20%. On compact desks, the mouse moves closer to the keyboard too, improving ergonomics.  The best compact keyboards are 75% to 80% of a standard sized keyboard. Full-size keyboards have every functionality you could ever need for a productive day. Trouble is, … Read more

Most desk setups are almost right. One thing is out of place — the chair too low, the screen too far, the keyboard too wide — and everything else is working harder than it should to compensate. An ergonomically correct desk setup isn’t about buying the right equipment. It’s about getting the relationships between things … Read more

 Shoulder pain at a desk is easy to blame on the obvious — the chair, the desk, the hours. But the more common causes are smaller than that, and so are the fixes. Most people experiencing shoulder pain from working on a computer assume the problem is either the chair or the volume of work. … Read more

Product descriptions tell you the switch type and the actuation force. They don’t tell you whether a keyboard will feel comfortable after four hours. Most people buy a keyboard the same way: based on what they already know. A standard layout, familiar feel, same size as the last one. It works until it doesn’t — … Read more

Space constraints make smaller keyboards seem like the obvious fix. But every size drop removes something. Deciding between the two requires you to know which keys you can afford to lose. A 75% keyboard is roughly the width of a laptop keyboard with a function row added above it. A 60% is closer to the … Read more

The keyboard is usually the biggest movable object on a desk. Swapping it for a smaller one costs less than a new desk and changes more than you’d expect. A cramped desk does more damage than it looks like it should. The keyboard pushes forward, the monitor follows, and before long you’re sitting closer to … Read more