Slashdot Mirror
Adjusting Your Work Environment to Work for You?
Darvin Pope asks: "I have a rather disconcerting problem at work: the environment is uncomfortable. Its not your standard, 'I hate my job' type of uncomfortable, its more of a general physical and mental issue than that. The entire place is done in earthtones, its dark and it can be noisy. My cube is situated across the room from most others, but still, its hard to acquire a peaceful, zenlike state of mind, neccesary for me to write my best code, with all the disturbances around. I was wondering if any of the slashdot folks had any hints - ranging from a change of seating posture to color schemes, desk clutter, music/white noise, herbal suppliments, dietary changes, lighting, and so on. What works best for the rest of you?"
Before you get started you'll need a head-mounted display, a good set of headphones, and one of those thick black trash bags...
Take on a couple minor system administration tasks. It will not only be accepted, but expected when you adopt a surly attitude and eventually lock yourself in the server room. Nobody bothers me anymore, though it's kinda cold in here and I have to wear a parka. The aluminum pyramid hat helps keep them away when I have to leave the server room to eat, visit the restroom, or when I'm showing up or leaving. If they approach anyway, fake a seizure. That works great.
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(But remember, drugs are bad! bad!)
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- Headphones for music and to reduce background noise. The choice of music can play a big part in creating a mood for your work environment.
- Posters to improve the "view"
- Lamps to change the lighting (if it is too dark or un-natural/natural)
- If you find your cubicle is designed to expose you to the view of the casual passer by then change the design of it by getting more partitions, or moving them around.
- Plants for your desk can give a refreshing feel to your cubicle.
- I've also found that play with the height and angle of your monitor can improve the vibe of your cubicle.
- Finally remeber the Hawthorne effect. I'm not sure if it applies if you make the changes yourself, but changes of any kind, if you percieve them as being in the interests of improved productivity WILL improve productivity.
Environments are important. You could be a crack hack wizard and still suck because of distractions.
The first and foremost important piece of your work environment is your chair. Make sure it's something you can be comfortable in for hours at a time, especially when coding. Get your feet off the floor and onto something. I personally use a high back leather chair and matching footstool. Medically, having your feet dangling or poorly supported for long periods of time is bad for you. Make sure you can lean back in your chair, and you're not working hunched over.
Match your chair to your desk, with regard to height. Find a working position between the two that's comfortable, or work out a way to get your keyboard lower. Ergonomics, while froofy, aren't a joke.
Noise suppression. If you're a coder, get some good noise cancellation going. Background noise reduction cuts down on a lot of distractions. Even if you're not pumping music into it, having your ears covered will quickly become a sign to people that you're busy. Train the mammals to send email instead of pop into your cube. I personally use Sony's noise reduction earbuds, which by shape alone are a functional earplug.
Lighting is important. I've had several cases of janitor combat by disengaging overhead flourescents in favor of a gentle incandescent lamp. Don't work in the dark, though. Hormonally, humans (and other diurnal creatures (this excludes Solaris admins)) are stimulated into various modes by light levels. One argument you'll be presented with should you decide to tamper with overheads is 'Safety Reasons'. Don't let this slide. It's YOUR work environment. Ground level strip lighting is just as effective, and less intrusive. Use indirect lighting where possible.
If you're in a heavy corporate environment, it's entirely plausible that certain management types will immediately single you out as a deviant, so use caution.
Some ammunition:
Oklahoma State Doc on Ergonomics and Environments: This is a good common sense doc about computer heavy work environments. You can draft a simple checklist based on the contents to see how your work environs stack up.
This document points out something important: OSHA does NOT have a standing (read: enforcable) ruling or standard for computer operation environments. Your employer can simply tell you to take a hike and get away with it. In some cases, I'd say take this up with HR, or rally your like minded coworkers, but given that most corporate HR teams simply don't give a damn, caveat emptor.
In the event your management doesn't go for it, here's a piece on combatting violence in the office.
In any case, do some homework before embarking on this quest. If nothing else, present it in simple financial terms. Personally controlled light environments tend to be less expensive to maintain than mass overhead lighting. No ladders required, less maintenance impact. Lights turned off when cubes are vacated at beer o' clock serve as pro-active energy management.
Single user monitor lamps, like these from Think Geek ($29.99 each) work very well. They did their homework about lighting advantages, as well. This brings cubespace lighting down from the ceiling and into the cube.
The drawback to this, and one of the first things managers (and site security) like to point out, is the reduced light level for the rest of the office. It's a perfectly valid argument, and generally brings lighting wars to a screaming halt. This can be replied to with something simple and inexpensive, like these Mini Lights, which would sit well on the exterior of any cube wall, illuminating the aisle.
As for general office lighting a few well placed torchiere style lamps (check your lamp types, though. Some suck more power than others) provide excellent indirect lighting.
- billn
a) Music. I have headphones on most of the time. Infra-red ones, so I don't get tangled. Just make sure people aren't scared of interrupting you - my colleagues know that I'm not blocking them out and am willing to talk to them.
b) Walking. I wander around and chat with friends.
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Whenever possible turn off fluorescent lighting.
:-).
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Try and use a desk lamp with a plain old light bulb or a halogen bulb if you can.
Also dim the place a bit down if you can; my eyes get very tired if I'm exposed to much lighting for extended periods of time.
As long as you're not working as a graphics designer try and eliminate the colour white from your colour scheme, try reversing it for a change, white to black and vice versa, personally I don't code unless the editor I'm using has a black background with white letters. If you think about it staring at a monitor all day long with the colour white as a default background colour on most applications isn't all that different from staring at a brightly lit white cloth or white wall, your eyes _will_ get tired and that leads discomfort.
As for music, use headphones as much as you can, and don't be cheap when it comes to headphones. Make sure they're comfortable and cover your ear in a way that they sit _around_ your ear and not _on_ it, you'll be thankful later. As for what sort of music, to each his own I'm afraid. In my case it mostly depends on what I'm doing, if I'm in a "zone" I try to keep it uptempo, but most of the time just something in harmony with my inner rhythm (we all have it, it's just a matter of finding/noticing it).
There is just one rule I have about food, and that is "not too much". Don't eat so that you get a full stomach, that way you'll only get bloated which registered as a discomfort last time I checked
Also try and avoid sweets if you can, although it's perfectly alright to treat oneself to a biscuit or pastery every now and then. Try and avoid fatty foods if you can but overall try and keep a nice varied and balanced diet.
Postures are hard to find, but my best posture is when I sit so that almost every muscle in my body is relaxed and aren't dangling. I have a tendency to lie back in my chair with me feet on whatever I can find that lifts them from the floor.
But these are just a few of my suggestions, try these and pick the ones you find comfortable
First and foremost, I swear by my Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Yeah, they are spendy, but they are perfect for drowning out CPU noise and random cube-farm chatter. They are also extremely comfortable to wear for long periods of time. They tend to be a mild deterrent for random interruptions, which I find to be a bonus. Be warned that people will be forced to extreme measures to get your attention when you are wearing them. ;-)
Second, drink water. Get a nice big container and fill it from the local water cooler. Sip from it constantly. When it is empty, you will probably have to go to the restroom. On your way back fill the container again. Rinse and repeat. You will stay hydrated and your bladder will enforce an occasional stroll. Never underestimate the importance of hydration!
Other folks have mentioned forcibly removing fluorescent lights. I actually don't like it to be too dark, but my eyes get really irritated if I have to stare right into a fluorescent fixture. In the past I have solved this by using mosquito netting to create a screen. It was quite functional and looked ok. The netting diffused the light and softened it.
I like to create my own space by having lots of colorful stuff in my cube. Pictures, of course, and always toys. I favor yo-yos. Yo-yoing is a great break and helps to lubricate thinking. You have to stand up, stretch, move around. Learn some tricks. It's a great conversation starter, and you come back to the problem at hand more relaxed and focused.
Watch out for the lighting. I have worked in places where the lighting was both overly bright and too dim -- both of those states are hard to notice to begin with, but after a few weeks your eyes will really start to ache halfway through the day. If the lighting is too dim, like your question indicates, bringing in some indirect lighting (one of those floor lamps that opens towards the ceiling) might do the trick.
As simple as it may sound, make sure you've got a good eighteen to twenty-four inches between you and the monitor for most of the day.
If the walls are too dark and providing too much contrast, use posters as another comment suggested, or, alternatively, whiteboards (management loves to see those things around).
Along with all the other calls for "taking control of your audio input with headphones" and such, I must suggest one of the most effective things I ever tried: Stand up.
Most if not all cubicle desks are latched into the vertical. Put them at 44 inches, or whatever is comfortable for you, and get a bar-stool style chair. Adjust the so you can comfortably work standing up, and sitting down, or with your butt half on the chair, whatever is most comfortable at that moment.
The human spine evolved for movement, walking, not sitting for long periods of time. This setup allows you to adjust your position constantly, exercising your lower back, legs, etc.
Of course, being in a Japanese company means that I don't get to have a cubicle to work with for the forseeable future myself, and I can really feel the difference.
So try the most ergonomic position of all. Stand up for yourself!
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
I'm sure you've thought of this before, but telecommuting is the ultimate answer for your all your crappy-work-environment needs.
I myself prefer telecommuting from a cafe. Cafes, I find, are ideal for working because:
(1) Nice persons bring hot tasty caffinated things right to you.
(2) No one cares if you get up and go for a half-hour walk.
(3) No one asks you annoying questions about how to "program" cells in Excel. (sigh)
(4) I live in Montreal in a Francophone neighbourhood, so (and this is utterly fantastic) I have *no* *idea* what people around me are nattering about! It's all the advantages of being around peeps enjoying themselves (which for some reason *always* relaxes me; it must be tribal psychological throwback) minus the drawback that you have to listen to fifteen-year-old girls psychoanalyzing each other and making grave pronouncements about each other's mental health or dateability or some such. At any rate, I imagine non-Quebequois can get a similar experience via a walkman.
<offtopic>The really weird thing is that I do, in fact, speak French, and not too badly at that; however, it's a second language learned after the childhood 'window'. For whatever reason, the consensus among myself and my friends with similar experiences is that comprehension for such languages is purely voluntary, whereas with your mother tongue eavesdropping is sometimes an uncontrollable fact of life. </offtopic>
- undoware.ca
First, as others have mentioned, lighting can work wonders. The overhead lights (florescent) are about the worst thing you can use in an office environment with computers. On the other hand, too little light can be just as bad. I had a floor lamp (one of the ones that opens up toward the ceiling) that had a bulb go out, so I temporarily used a small (and very dim) desk lamp. It was about as bad as having too much light. The floor lamp is much better.
Also, here's a few other tips (some have been mentioned previously) that work for me:
Remember this -- you aren't there to look pretty, you are there to do your job. If you need to make modifications to your environment in order to improve your job performance, then it's worth it. I personally wear jeans, a sports shirt, and tennis shoes to work every day. It's a lot easier to work in that than it is to work in dressy clothes.Also, a lot of what works and doesn't work will depend on the person and possibly the company you are in. Each person has their own needs and what environment works for me may not work for others. YMMV.
Oh, and if your phone system uses standard phones (in other words, no proprietary multiline garbage, your call hold/transfer/conference uses flash hook, and you can use standard Wal-Mart phones on it) then you most likely don't have a DND button. Nortel's Meridian system can have add-on cards to support standard phones, as can many others. Just buy a project box, mount a SPST switch in it, connect one leg of the switch to one leg of a 600 ohm resistor, the other leg of the switch to one side of the phone line, and the remaining leg of the resistor to the other side of the line. When you flip the switch, it puts a 600 ohm load across the line, which is like taking the phone off hook. Instant busy signal. :) (Just make sure it is a standard phone compatible system -- else things can get a bit hairy when you start plugging things in like that.)
I'm not completely sure where I read this (possibly Peopleware), but I'm quite convinced that it's true.
The "creative" part of your brain is also the part that listens to music. Therefore you can't effectively do both at the same time. (I suspect that heavy stuff like Beethoven is especially bad, in fact.)
Of course, you don't need to be creative most of the time. Once you've worked out a design, coding (should be) easy...
When people at my previous company started complaining that the work environment was too noisy and cramped, management suggested that people should work from home more.
Getting rid of the wires on things goes a long way to improving your comfort. I highly recommend the Logitech Wireless Keyboard Pro (comes with a wireless mouse) and a set of wireless headphones, Sennheiser makes some decent ones.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
When I really need to concentrate I find ear plugs are perfect. Now that my comptuer is a lot power laptop and NCD there are no fans on my desk, but just the heating system is annoying when I really need to think of a problem.
I don't like headphones. Maybe wireless would be okay, but wired are really annoying. A normal radio on low volumn works for my co-workers. Technically it is against the rules here, but the volume is so low you have to be in their cube to hear it. The key is even a whisper in you cube will drown out the radio.