History That Never Was

Most writers I know use a laptop as their primary working computer. But with laptops come a lot of problems in terms of ergonomics– you’re often looking down at your screen, typing on an awkward keyboard, and trying to avoid hitting the trackpad. Particularly for writers who spend a lot of time on their computer, getting an ergonomically optimized setup is a necessity.

I’ve been optimizing my computer setup bit by bit, but finally took the step of getting a riser piece that lets me raise the monitor up to eye level. The one I decided on was similar to ones that one of my co-workers picked up for a couple of our workstations at work, which allows you to choose six different positions, each of which changes how high the monitor sits. Of course, it puts the keyboard at a weird and awkward angle, which meant I needed a separate wireless keyboard (I already had disabled my trackpad and gotten a wireless mouse a while ago.

I’m not 100 percent sure about the keyboard yet–it’s taking a little bit of getting used to–but I LOVE having the monitor raised. And I can always experiment with other keyboards later–the one I picked was inexpensive and takes AAA batteries, which we had at home.

I don’t often spend the whole day writing on my laptop, but I do occasionally have marathon sessions on the weekend, and I think this newly optimized computer setup is going to help a lot with those!

Tags: advice, ergonomics, laptop accessories

This entry was posted by dawn.vogel on Monday, June 10th, 2019 at 6:00 am and is filed under Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.