The number one, most important thing you utilize, if you work at a desk, is your chair. I look at a chair as an essential piece of the “productivity” puzzle. If I’m in a comfortable chair, I can endure long periods of time at my desk and still be comfortable.
If the chair is uncomfortable, not only does it impact the time I sit in it, it also impacts the amount and quality work that gets done while I’m sitting in it.
I’ve gone through a lot of chairs. I’ve sat in folding chairs, kitchen table chairs, cheap chairs from the office supply store and the fad chairs that hit the scene from time to time.
Someone once told me that I had to get the newest fad, a “kneeling” chair. They raved on about how good it is for your body. I think I was supposed to live forever if I used one of those chairs, so I bought one. It was okay for a time but kneeling all day is just not comfortable.
I still have it around here somewhere in a corner in my office. It works better as a clothes hanger than it ever did as a chair.
I tried one of those ball chairs with the arms on the side—it didn’t work for me! The bottom line is, you need to find something that works for you.
The way I look at a chair is similar to the way I look at a suit. Let me digress here for a minute as I explain what I mean by that statement.
When I sold vacuum cleaners, they gave me a list of 100 things to say in order to get the person to buy. A lot of these sayings were quality related. For example, one that I remember went something like this…
It’s always bad to pay a little less to get a lot less.
I took that statement to heart. When I sold vacuum cleaners, I wore a pinstripe suit and a tie. I looked like I worked in the financial industry or was a corporate executive. I dressed the absolute best I could on the money I made.
A guy told me that when buying a suit, you want to pay twice as much and buy half as many. I asked him why, and he said, “if you spend twice as much, the quality of the suit will be better and will last longer. Also, the style will be better and stay ‘in style’ longer so you only need to buy half as many.”
I thought both of these statements were good advice, and I still live by them today.
