• You’ve taken the plunge, come up with the idea, handed in your notice, and prepared yourself to give it all 24 hours a day, 7 days a week until you’ve cracked it.

• Your cash is limited, so you’re spending it on the newest, most powerful computer available to keep you ahead of the field, while all the time you watch your marketing efforts develop the sort of spending habits that Imelda Marcos would have been proud of.

• Fine – so you have to move your PC every time the family wants breakfast, your back is starting to feel stiff from the base of your spine to the top of your neck, you can hardly move your mouse in the morning because of the pains in your wrist, and you wish this headache would go away just for a moment….

• Sadly, as we all know, the human body was not designed to be seated for 12 hours a day staring fixedly at a flickering screen, with only the repeated movement of the head from keyboard to monitor to count as exercise.

• When you work in an office it’s up to your company to make sure that the furniture that they provide you with is suitable for the task they’ve asked you to perform. Why? Because every day that you take off with back ache, or a migraine, or circulatory problems, is costing them money. Worse still, a courtroom is no place to bump into ex-employees.

• So it’s strange that when many people set up their own business or consultancy from home, the first area they look to save money on is the furniture. When you take the day off sick now no-one else is there to cover for you. Now, as Imelda might have said, the boot’s on the other foot!

• All is not lost if you don’t have the cash from the word go to spend on that state-of-the-art home office. There are several ways to minimise the problems associated with long hours at the computer. Here are just a few of them:
  1. Your feet should be flat on the floor with your knees bent at a 90 degree angle

  2. Your back should be straight, and at an angle of no less than 90 degrees from your thighs

  3. Your elbows should be at 90 degrees, with your palms being at keyboard height

  4. The top of your monitor should be at eye level, with the monitor itself about an arm's length away from you.

  If you’ve got all of that sorted, then you’re pretty much there, although there is one more thing that is the most important of the lot – Movement is Key! At least once an hour you should take a mini-break just to get up, stretch, walk about a bit and rest your eyes (That doesn’t mean take a nap!).

• If you’re already at the stage where the aches and pains are affecting your business then there may be one other route to take. More and more people are now booking Ergonomic Assessments. This is where a highly qualified and specialised physiotherapist visits your office and creates a detailed analysis of your size, shape, previous physical complaints, and your present working requirements. This then translates into a detailed anthropometrical and ergonomic report, as well as recommendations for improving the current situation.

• At Home Working Solutions we are so convinced about the importance of ergonomically correct working practices that we are currently trying to build a nationwide contact list of Independent assessors, and we’d be delighted to hear from any of you with any recommendations or suggestions.

• In the meantime we wish you a very successful and healthy future with your business!
  Thank you to Home Working Solutions for their helpful article. You can visit them at www.homeworkingsolutions.co.uk and if you join their Home Working Club then you can get 5% off their prices.