The fifteen-minute home-office setup, in the right order

Desk setup advice is usually a list. Lists are the wrong shape for this, because these adjustments depend on each other: change your chair height and your monitor height is now wrong, change your desk and your armrests are wrong.

So here it is as a sequence. Work down it once, in order, and nothing needs redoing.

Set aside fifteen minutes. You will need something solid to raise your feet on and something solid to raise a screen on — books are genuinely fine for both.

1. Chair height, set from your elbows

Sit at your desk. Let your arms hang, then bend your elbows to a right angle.

Raise or lower the chair until your forearms are level with the desk surface. Ignore your feet completely for now. The desk height is fixed and your elbows have to meet it, so the chair is what moves.

2. Feet, supported flat

Now look down. If your feet are flat on the floor with your knees at roughly a right angle, you are lucky and your desk happens to suit you.

If they dangle — the common outcome for anyone under about 180 cm — put something under them. A footrest, a box, a ream of paper. It needs to be solid and not slide. Knees at roughly a right angle on top of it.

This is a real fix, not a bodge. See why standard desk height is wrong for what is actually going on here.

3. Seat depth, two fingers

Sit right back against the backrest. Slide two fingers into the gap between the front edge of the seat and the back of your knee.

Two to three fingers is correct. No gap means the seat is too deep and it is why you keep sliding forward. If your chair has a seat-slide lever, use it now. Full version: does your chair actually fit you.

4. Armrests, shoulders down

Hands on the keyboard. Let your shoulders drop.

Set the armrests so your shoulders stay dropped and your forearms rest lightly on them — supported, not propped up. If they cannot go low enough and they are pushing your shoulders up, take them off. More on why unsupported arms hurt your neck.

5. Keyboard and mouse, close in

Pull the keyboard towards you until your elbows sit near your sides at roughly a right angle.

Then bring the mouse in beside it. Not beyond it, not on a different surface, not out to the right. Same height as the keyboard, as close as you can stand.

6. Monitor, last

Only now, with your body in its final position, does the screen get set.

Sit normally, close your eyes, let your head settle, open them. You should be looking at a point roughly 5 to 10 cm below the top edge of the screen. Raise the screen with books until that is true.

Arm’s length away, squarely in front of you — not off to one side. If you wear varifocals, go lower. Full reasoning: your monitor is too low.

Laptop users: a laptop cannot pass this test, because raising the screen raises the keyboard. Either add an external keyboard and mouse and lift the laptop, or add an external monitor. There is no free version of this one, and it is the highest-value purchase available to you.

7. Then stop, and wait a week

Do not buy anything yet.

Live with the new setup for a week. A lot of discomfort takes a few days to fade, and a lot of “I need a new chair” turns out to have been a seat-depth lever nobody had touched.

After a week, whatever is still bothering you is a real problem, and now you know precisely what it is — which is a far better position to shop from than a list of the same eight chairs everyone recommends.

The one that beats all seven

Get up every half hour or so.

No posture is good for eight hours, including the correct one. The research on desk discomfort points at how long you hold a position at least as much as at which position you hold. A correctly set-up desk that you never leave still hurts.

This is free, it works better than anything on this list, and there is nothing we could ever sell you that would replace it.