I am bad at sitting in chairs. I can’t sit with my feet on the floor to save my life. It’s partly because my legs are short, so I often have to sit on the edge of the chair to be able to put my feet on the floor, but it’s mostly because I prefer sitting cross-legged, or with my legs folded underneath me. This gets to be a problem when I have to sit in a chair at a desk all day. For one thing, my legs aren’t as young as they used to be, and my knees often hurt after being bent and squished all day. But even worse, cramming all of my legs into an office chair that is only made to hold thighs puts me into some weird and bad postures. This leads to debilitating tension headaches.
For a while, I thought that the solution to this was going to be a Japanese-style floor desk. I thought I might get a really low table, and then just sit on a pillow or meditation cushion, maybe with a little Japanese-style chair for back support. In theory, that’s a great idea, but the logistics are complicated. It would mean getting a new desk and completely rearranging the office. You can get desks that adjust from chair height to standing height, but not desks that adjust from floor height to chair height, so if I got a floor desk, I would be stuck with it. (Actually, there is a desk that adjusts from floor height all the way up to standing height, but you have to manually lift the desktop to do that, and with an external monitor, that’s just not practical.)
