Typing posture: how to set up your chair, desk and keyboard

Most typing posture advice is written by somebody selling a chair. This is not, so it will not end with a product, and two of the eleven rows in the checklist below say that no authority publishes a number at all.

The reason to care about the correct posture for typing has little to do with comfort. Your hands can only reach what they can reach from a fixed anchor, and where that anchor sits decides how far every finger travels. A desk that is two inches too high does not make you uncomfortable first. It makes you slow first, and uncomfortable a fortnight later.

Six positions, in the order worth fixing them#

If you do nothing else, do these in this order. Each one moves the next, which is why chair height is last rather than first.

• Elbows bent between 90 and 120 degrees, close to your body.
• Wrists straight and in line with your forearms, not bent up toward the screen.
• Keyboard flat on the desk, or tilted away from you. Never propped up on its feet.
• Screen top at or just below eye level, about an arm's length away.
• Feet flat on the floor, or on a box if the chair will not go low enough.
• Chair height set to whatever makes the five above true.

The numbers, and who publishes them#

Every figure below comes from either the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration's computer workstation guidance or Cornell University's Ergonomics Web. Where neither publishes a number, the row says so rather than inventing one.

Two rows in that table are the interesting ones. Chair height has no target because it is not an input: it is whatever height puts your elbows and feet where the other rows say. And no authority I can find states a rule about resting your wrists while you type, which is worth knowing given how confidently the internet does.

Wrists: floating, not parked#

This is the one that costs you speed, and the argument for it is mechanical rather than medical.

Your fingers do not each own one key. Each owns a small neighbourhood and reaches into it from home. The left middle finger covers E, D and C by moving, not by having three fingers. Park the heel of your hand on the desk and you have fixed the pivot those reaches rotate around. Every key outside the immediate ring now needs a stretch instead of a movement, and the longest reaches, the number row and the outer punctuation, become the worst ones.

You can feel it in ten seconds. Rest your wrists on the desk and type a line with a few capitals and a comma in it. Then lift them so your hands hover, and type the same line. The second one is easier, and the difference is entirely in the reaches rather than in the keys under your fingers.

So what is a wrist rest for? The pauses. It is a place to put your hands between bursts of typing, not a shelf to type from. Neither OSHA nor Cornell states that as a rule, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It is what follows from the neutral-wrist target the two of them do state.

Elbows, shoulders and the chair#

OSHA's figure is 90 to 120 degrees at the elbow, with the elbows close to the body. Cornell adds a reason for preferring the open end of that range: an opened elbow angle promotes circulation to the forearm and hand.

The practical version: your shoulders should be doing nothing. If they are lifted, the desk is too high or the chair is too low. If you are reaching down and forward to type, the chair is too high. Shoulders that have crept up toward your ears are the single easiest sign to spot in yourself, and they are usually a desk-height problem wearing a chair-height disguise.

Set the chair so your elbows land at the right angle with your shoulders down, and only then look at your feet. If they no longer reach the floor, that is a footrest problem, not a reason to raise the chair back up. A stack of books works.

Screen height, and the angle nobody sets#

The top of the screen goes at or just below eye level. That part is widely known. The part that is not: OSHA puts the centre of the monitor 15 to 20 degrees below horizontal eye level, which is lower than almost anyone sets it.

Viewing distance is 20 to 40 inches, roughly an arm's length, and the screen should tilt back 10 to 20 degrees so it stays square to your line of sight. Further away is fine if the text is still comfortable; too close is the more common error, and it comes with the head-forward posture that makes a neck ache by the afternoon.

Keyboard tilt, and the feet you should fold away#

Almost every keyboard has flip-out feet at the back that raise the far edge. Almost everybody uses them. Cornell's finding is that this positive slope encourages wrist extension, meaning the wrist bent upward, and that the better arrangement is the opposite: flat, or sloped gently away from you, with the keyboard below seated elbow height.

Fold the feet away and type for a day before deciding. It feels wrong for about an hour, because the visual angle of the keys changes, and then it stops feeling like anything at all.

A negative-slope tray is the full version of this and costs money. The free version is folding two plastic feet flat, which gets you most of the way there.

Laptops, and the cheapest fix on this page#

A laptop cannot satisfy this list. The screen and the keyboard are attached, so putting the screen at eye level puts the keyboard at chest height, and putting the keyboard at elbow height puts the screen in your lap. Every laptop user is choosing which of the two to get wrong.

The fix is to stop them being attached: raise the laptop until its screen is right, and use a separate keyboard at elbow height. A stand and a cheap keyboard is the whole solution, and a stack of books does the stand's job perfectly well.

If you cannot do that, on a train or in a café, get the keyboard right and accept the screen. Your neck can tolerate a bad angle for an hour more easily than your wrists can tolerate one all week.

Ten minutes, once#

• Sit back in the chair with your feet flat and your shoulders down.
• Raise or lower the chair until your elbows sit between 90 and 120 degrees at the keyboard.
• If your feet have left the floor, put something under them.
• Fold your keyboard's back feet flat, and move it close enough that you are not reaching forward.
• Raise the screen until its top edge is at or just under eye level, then push it back to about arm's length.
• Tilt the screen back slightly, until it faces you square on.
• Type a paragraph. Your wrists should hover; your shoulders should be doing nothing.

That is the whole job, and it stays done. An ergonomic typing position is a thing you arrange once; the only thing that reliably undoes it is a different chair.

When it is not a setup problem#

This is a guide to arranging a desk, and that is all it is. Pain, numbness, tingling or weakness in your hands or arms are not things to fix by reading a checklist, and nothing on this page is medical advice.

If you have any of those, see a doctor or a physiotherapist, and do it early rather than after a month of hoping. The useful thing you can bring them is specifics: which fingers, at what time of day, after how long, and what your desk looks like. A photograph of your setup is worth more than a description of it.

Two questions worth answering#

Does posture actually make me faster, or just more comfortable? Both, but the speed part arrives first and is easier to measure. Fix the anchor your hands reach from and the long reaches get shorter. The number row and the outer punctuation are where you will notice it. Take a timed test before you change anything and another a week later, and compare the per-key breakdown rather than the headline speed.

Do I need an ergonomic keyboard? No, and it is the wrong place to start. Everything on this page is free except a footrest and a laptop stand, and neither of those has to be bought. Get the geometry right on the keyboard you own before you spend anything, because a split keyboard at the wrong height is still at the wrong height.

Once the desk is right, the other physical fundamental is which finger owns which key. Our guide to keyboard finger placement has the full map, and the beginner course drills it in order. If you are past that stage, structured practice is where the reaches get shorter.