Working from the sofa, the bed or the kitchen table

Most ergonomics advice assumes you have a desk, a task chair and a room to put them in. Plenty of people have a kitchen table, a sofa, and a flat they share.

So here is the version for that. No purchase required, because the useful changes here are not purchases.

Why the sofa is the worst option

It is worth being specific, because “sit properly” is useless advice on furniture designed to stop you.

A sofa is built for reclining. The seat is deep, so you cannot sit back without your legs sticking out, and the back is soft, so it gives rather than supporting. The result is a rotated pelvis and a flattened lower back — the same failure as a chair with too deep a seat, except you cannot adjust anything.

Then the laptop goes on your knees, which is well below eye level, so your head tips forward for the whole session. And your arms have nothing to rest on, so your shoulders hold them up.

Three problems at once, none adjustable. If you have any alternative, use it.

The bed is worse in one way, better in another

Worse: even less back support, and you tend to work with your legs straight out in front, which rounds the lower back hard.

Better: only in that you often prop up on pillows, which if you do it deliberately can support your back and raise the laptop somewhat.

If bed is genuinely your only option, sit up against the headboard with a firm pillow in the small of your back, knees bent with a pillow underneath, and the laptop on something solid — a hard book, a tray — rather than directly on your legs. It is still bad. It is meaningfully less bad.

The kitchen table is the good news

A kitchen table and a dining chair look like the compromise option and they are actually the best starting point most people have, because both are the right kind of thing: a firm flat surface and a firm upright seat.

They have two fixable faults.

The chair is too low for the table. Dining tables sit around 75 cm, dining chairs around 45 cm. That gap is designed for eating, not typing, so you reach up to the table and your shoulders come up with you.

Fix it by raising yourself, not the table: a firm cushion on the chair until your forearms are level with the tabletop. Then your feet will not reach the floor, so put something solid under them — a box, a stack of books, a ream of paper. Feet flat, knees at a right angle. This is exactly the approach in the desk height guide, and it works here for the price of a cushion.

The chair back is vertical and flat. Roll a towel and put it in the small of your back, at belt height. That restores the curve a task chair’s lumbar support would.

Do those two things and a kitchen table beats a lot of real desks.

Then raise the screen

Whatever the surface, the laptop screen is going to be too low, because raising a laptop raises its keyboard.

Without buying anything: stack books under the laptop until the top of the screen is at eye level, and use a separate keyboard if you have one. If you do not have one, the honest advice is that this is the one purchase worth making — a cheap keyboard and mouse unlock every other fix on this page, and they cost less than almost anything else in ergonomics.

If you have neither and cannot buy them, the least-bad compromise is to alternate: raise the laptop for reading, lower it for typing. Not ideal. Better than holding one bad position all day.

What matters most when nothing is adjustable

When you cannot fix the furniture, the variable you still control is time.

Every fixed setup gets worse the longer you hold it, and a bad setup gets worse faster. If you are working from a sofa, get up every twenty minutes rather than every hour. Move between surfaces during the day — an hour at the kitchen table, then a stretch, then somewhere else — so that no single bad position accumulates.

This is not a consolation prize. Changing position frequently genuinely does more than any single piece of furniture, and it is the one thing available to everybody regardless of budget or square metres.

The shortest version

• Kitchen table plus dining chair, with a cushion under you and a box under your feet, beats everything else here.
• Roll a towel behind your lower back.
• Get the screen up on books, and use a separate keyboard if you possibly can.
• Sofa only for short stretches, never a full day.
• Move more often than someone with a proper desk needs to.