(inspiring music) (ECG beeps)
(phone clicks)
(keypad clicks)
- Okay, have you ever felt tension
in your shoulders, your arms, or your back
after working at a cluttered desk all day?
Here is the great news.
You could avoid this problem
by simply making adjustments to your workspace.
Limited space on the work surface
may cause other people to place devices
in undesirable positions that are hard to reach,
and this placement may lead to awkward postures
as you reach for a mouse or you look for a monitor
that is supposed to be placed to the side,
and your work surface depth should also allow you
to view the monitor at a distance
of at least about 20 inches or 50 centimeters,
and position the monitor to achieve
the appropriate viewable angle,
which is generally just directly right in front of you.
Hard, angled leading edges
that come in contact with the user's arm or wrist
can really create contact stress.
See, it affects the nerves and the blood vessels
in that area of the body that contacts it,
and possibly it causes some other signs and symptoms
like tingling and sore fingers.
Now, just minimize that contact stress
by using a simple wrist rest or padding,
padding the table edges,
or even, if you're gonna make these table edges customized,
you could even just make sure that whoever is making them
grinds that off at an ergonomically correct edge,
and that'll avoid all of those complications.
If you feel like the space under your desk is inappropriate,
it's probably because the work surface was designed poorly
or there's just too much excessive clutter.
Regardless of the reason,
it can still result in discomfort
and performance inefficiencies
such as fatigue, circulation restrictions,
and contact stress due to constriction of movement
and the inability to frequently change your feet's positions
or your legs' positions,
and it's all going to start to lead to this,
this problem with the MSDs.
And so, get the stuff out from underneath your desks,
make sure you have the amount of space
that is required for you to be able to move properly
and sit in a neutral position,
and you'll probably be able to avoid most of those problems.
If you're ever working on a project
that requires you to have documents near your monitors,
sometimes if those documents are positioned too far away
from the monitor itself,
it may require some really awkward head postures
or frequent movements of your head and your neck
to look from the monitor to the document,
document back to the monitor,
and those awkward postures can really lead
to some great muscle fatigue and discomfort problems
of not only your neck, not only your shoulders,
but even your head itself, leading you to headaches
and other acute or chronic problems.
To fix this problem, just simply place the documents
at or about the same height and the distance
as the monitor screen itself.
A document holder can be
positioned directly beneath the monitor
and that's going to allow you
to keep the same neutral posture
while simply your eyes move back and forth
and do the majority of the work for you.
This is really gonna cut down
on the excessive awkward movements
and it's probably gonna save you
a lot of discomfort and a lot of pain.
In most offices, we all have a phone
and something as simple as a phone
can cause a great deal of pain and injury
if it's not used properly.
Placing the telephone too far away from you
can cause you to be repeatedly reaching
and then resulting in a strain
of the shoulder, the arm, or the neck.
And talking on the phone with the handset pinched
between your shoulder and your head,
you know that's wrong, so it could easily cause you
to have stress and neck pain.
Well, you can easily fix this problem
by placing the telephone at a comfortable distance
depending on usage patterns.
And this will minimize your repeated reaching,
it's gonna help reduce the possibility of the injury,
and if you plan on spending a lot of time on the phone,
simply use the speakerphone option, if it's good enough,
or maybe invest in a hands-free headset.
All of that is going to really help you tremendously.