Fine, I'm Up

I've been putting in some long hours in front of the ol' scriptwriting box, and most of those long hours have been sitting, with horrible posture, either crunched in an IKEA chair (padding long gone) or slouched on my bed (laptop balanced on my cat). But then. THEN! I read Anna's post about how not to ruin my health with my art, and I got inspired to make myself a temporary standing desk.



Yeah that's right! I own a lot of cookbooks!

Here are some lessons I have learned from my standing desk experiment.

• This actually works. I hate standing so much that I super-focus on the writing, knowing that as soon as I hit my daily goals, I can go slouch somewhere. But not before.
  
• Speaking of daily goals, I wasn't really setting them BSD (Before Standing Desk). But now I am. Also sometimes if I'm really distractible, I do interval training: I set my cell phone timer (that's right, I also have a cell phone) to ten minutes. Then I write without stopping for ten minutes. When the timer goes off, I do something else for two minutes. I know I didn't invent this, but you know how when something works it totally feels like you invented it? Like blenders, or flying?
  
• My desk is really wobbly. I should probably get a new one. I think I inherited this from a roommate who moved out six years ago.
  
• Not only am I writing quicker at Standing Desk, I'm also getting more sleep. 'Cause of how I'm focusing, and also, 'cause of how I am giving myself hard stopping points. It turns out that walking away from something and returning to it fresh the next day is way better than binge-writing for 48 hours. Not that anyone here has ever done that.
  

IS THAT ENOUGH BRAGGING FOR YOU? Okay, good. I would recommend Standing Desk to anyone. Not sure that I'm ready to throw out my chair entirely, but it is no longer the boss of me.

Also I should clearly clean up my workstation. Ugh.