Monitor top edge at eye level, chair adjusted, feet flat on the floor. Mornings are fine. From about 2pm there is a dull ache at the base of my skull that gets worse until I stop working. If the setup were simply wrong I would expect it to hurt all day. What changes over the course of a day that would do this?
Top edge at eye level is the standard advice and it is slightly too high for a lot of people, especially with progressive lenses — you end up tipping your head back to read through the bottom of the lens all afternoon. If you wear varifocals, try the monitor 10 to 15cm lower than feels right.
No glasses here, but that is a useful thing to know.
Fatigue is cumulative in the neck extensors, so a small load that is fine for two hours is not fine for six. Whatever you do it will not be one adjustment that fixes it, it will be a smaller load plus more frequent breaks. If the ache ever starts spreading down an arm or bringing tingling with it, that is the point to get a physio to look at it rather than tinkering with the desk.
Check the armrests. If they are too low your shoulders hang all day and the traps take the load, which builds up on exactly this timescale. Mine were about 3cm too low and raising them changed my afternoons.
Armrest height is the single most under-adjusted control on any office chair. Most people never touch it once.
@negative_split_nan · 2mo ago · 3 replies
What changes is that you stop holding the good position. Nobody sustains a posture for six hours, and by the afternoon you are creeping toward the screen without noticing. The thing that worked for me was not a better setup but interrupting the accumulation: a timer every 30 minutes, stand up, roll the shoulders back, look at something far away for 20 seconds, sit back down. It sounds too simple and it took my afternoon neck ache from daily to about once a fortnight. Two other things to check: screen brightness against the room once the daylight drops, because squinting pulls the head forward, and whether you switch to a laptop for afternoon calls.
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@pomodoro_pat · 2mo ago
I do move to the laptop for the afternoon calls. Every single day. Never connected it.
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@negative_split_nan · 2mo ago
There it is. A laptop screen sits 25cm below eye level and an hour a day of that is plenty to produce exactly what you are describing. A stand and a separate keyboard, even cheap ones, is the whole fix.
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