A year ago, I spent hours searching for the perfect desk. When I finally found it, I ordered it, carefully assembled it, and after admiring my work for an hour, I decided I wanted to try the desk out. I grabbed the nearest chair, sat down and smiled as I used my brand new desks for the first time. An hour later, I started getting restless. I got up, stretched and made myself the tenth cup of tea for the day. I sat back down to work again. Half an hour later, my back was hurting. Another half hour later, my rear end felt like it’s been flattened, and I am regretting all the time and money I wasted on buying the stupid desk, because I realized I wouldn’t be using it anyway. Of course, if I had spent the same amount of time looking for the perfect chair, as I did looking for the perfect desk, I wouldn’t have been wallowing in regret. Thankfully, I’ve learned my lesson. So this year, when I decided to replace my old desk, I also decided to spend some time and money choosing the perfect chair.
I often thought that just any old chair would do when it came to my office space. The truth is, my chair is probably the biggest contributing factor to whether I get work done or not. more comfortable chair = more work time put in = more work done In order to get a lot of work or writing done, I need to spend an enormous amount of time sitting (unless I’m weird and I write standing up). I discovered that sitting can be hard on my body, especially if I’m sitting on an ill-fitting chair for hours. An ill-fitting chair can lead to bad posture, which in turn can lead to a variety of health problems such as back pain, neck pain, butt pain and a host of other general aches and pains. Since I wished to avoid these health problems, as well as enjoy the brand-new desk I bought, I considered the following criteria for choosing my chair: 1. Adjustability of Seat Height I’m the kind of person who wears tall slippers one day and goes barefoot the next, so I need to be able to adjust the height of my chair.
If I want to be comfortable, my feet should be flat on the ground as I’m working. 2. Armrest and Armrest Height I need a chair that has cushioned and adjustable armrests, but I also want armrests that would easily slide underneath the keyboard drawer. The depth of the seat is also important for my comfort. I should be able to sit with my back against the back rest and have at least three inches of space between the front of my chair and the back of my knees. According to an article I read, a straight-edged seat tends to press on the back of your legs, cutting of the circulation, so a round seat edge would be preferable to add to my long term comfort. A cloth fabric that breathes would probably be more comfortable if I’m going to spend a lot time sitting. It’s cheap and practical–but why would I pick it when leather or vinyl seats are sexier and more professional looking? But that’s just me. The style of the chair should also match the desk I already picked out, as well as the general décor of the office.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this whole desk/chair buying experience, it’s that the cushier the chair, the more inclined I am to stay in it. This time, instead of settling for a hard wooden chair, I’m opting to go for a chair with a firm but cushy bottom. This is the most important criterion in choosing the right chair. A properly fitted chair should support my lower back – whether I’m moving or reclining. A good chair will have adjustable back support ( in terms of height and angle ) to fit my body. 7. Stability/ Ease of Use Finally, the chair I pick should be stable. It should be able to swivel and roll so I can easily move around to reach papers or equipment or other areas of my desk. In other words, my chair should have five legs with matching wheels. I normally would just go on craiglist to buy a second hand chair for half the price, or scour flea markets and second hand shops; but I wanted a new chair and I wanted it right away. I opted to shop online to save myself some time and even some money by comparing prices and using available coupons.
Armed with these criteria, I immediately set to work looking for the perfect chair. I scoured chairs online, checked out their specs, matched them against my criteria and compared prices. Ideally, I should have gone to an actual store, taken time to sit on each available chair and then made my choice. But being the busy person that I was, I decided to save time and buy online. But even though I was buying the chair online, I went with a seller that had an actual physical store. I reasoned that, at least if I didn’t like the chair, I’d be able to return it and exchange it for something else. I found the perfect chair in Office Depot. The Dorra Bonded Leather Task Chair measured 38 1/2″H x 25 1/4″W x 24 3/4″D and its black leather matched my desk. More importantly, it met my criteria for the perfect chair. The best part was that it was on sale for $30 less! I bought the chair online for $59.99 (It’s usual price is $89.99) and I even got it on the same day because I chose to pick it up in the store myself.
(Choosing pick up instead of delivery saved me at least $30 in terms of shipping.) Now I have a chair I love to sit in. I can tell all the research and hard work has paid off because I find myself spending more time on my desk writing than on the couch downstairs watching TV.It's an oft-overlooked fact that we at Ars have no actual central office out of which we work. Although we do have space set aside at the Condé Nast building in New York, it's rare that we actually are in a position to use it. Instead, each of us works out of our respective homes scattered across the USA. We did a short gallery last year showing what our home offices look like (spoiler alert: lots of Macs), but we didn't focus much on that all-important bit of office kit: the chair. People like us who spend most of the day writing have an extremely close relationship with their office chairs. We spend eight, 10, or 12 hours every day (and sometimes even more!) sprawled in the things, and a good chair can make the difference between a productive workspace and crippling boneitis.
You'd think that we'd all have high-quality crazy space chairs—and some of us actually do—but like any other group, we're actually pretty diverse in our seating choices. In fact, a couple of us don't use chairs at all. Senior IT reporter Jon Brodkin starts us out with his thoroughly average and only half-functional Office Max special: "This chair is pretty comfortable, but there’s nothing special about it. I bought it years before I started working at home, at Office Max or Office Depot, and I think I paid somewhere between $50 and $75 for it. The only problem is that it doesn’t always stay up at its full height, so I have to hit the lever a few times a week to raise it back up again. I don’t know why Lee wants a picture of it, but he’s a bit off in the head and he lives in Texas so I usually avoid asking too many questions." IT editor Sean Gallagher sent along this photograph of a freakishly green Ikea Markus chair, offering only this short explanation: "I put it against a wall to shoot it, and one of my cats jumped into it."
The Markus is a nice looking chair, but in that color it looks like it was ripped right out of the control room overlooking Santa's factory. Microsoft editor Peter Bright sits in a seat similar to Sean's, though Peter's chair lacks Sean's garish green hue. Says Peter: "The chair I use is the Ikea Markus. It's only a few weeks old. I needed a new office chair after emigrating, and while I'm intrigued by The Wirecutter's $800 Steelcase Leap recommendation I'm not going to spend that much money on a chair without giving my ass an opportunity to sample it—something that Ikea makes easy. Plus, it was an opportunity to stock up on meatballs. "A few weeks in and the chair seems to be holding up fine. It's perhaps not the most attractive thing I've ever seen, but it seems decently comfortable even for long sessions, and I think I'm probably slouching a bit less than normal." Senior Products Specialist Andrew Cunningham's chair looks positively beefy—which is weird, because Andrew himself has the dimensions of a Festivus pole.
Still, it holds a special place in his rail-thin heart. He explains: "My chair is not exotic, nor is the story of how I bought it: we went to our local Staples, sat in a bunch of office chairs, and picked the most comfortable one in our price range (as I recall, it was a $250 chair on sale for $150). It’s a gripping tale of budgets and sensible decision-making! "The reason why I was buying the chair looms larger in my mind than the chair itself. It was the spring of 2011, and after several years of writing for little to nothing (heavy emphasis on the “nothing”) I was finally making enough to justify some additional investment. Item one on the list was an actual desk chair to replace the '80s-looking thing my parents had given me to go with my first post-college apartment. It’s not the best chair, but it was one of the first things I bought in service of the career I really wanted." Ars Editor-at-Large Jacqui Cheng steps things up a considerable number of notches, leaving behind Office Depot Specials and stepping into the world of dedicated task seating.
Says Jacqui: "My chair is a Humanscale Freedom chair with a headrest and swiveling arms. After 7.5 years of working from home in a terrible $50 Staples chair, my back (and butt) couldn’t take it anymore. As someone with chronic lower back problems, I could no longer deal with sitting in a cheap chair that wasn’t really made for me, so I bit the bullet and spent weeks testing nicer chairs to find out which one I liked. "The Humanscale Freedom was the one I settled on (although I also liked the Herman Miller Mirra) because of the way it positions my spine when I sit. I’m able to sit comfortably without pain in my power back, plus the whole chair conforms to your spine when you lean back, so different parts of the chair move in different ways. The swivel arms are meant to turn inward so they better support you while you’re typing, although I think they could swivel inward a little more. Overall, this is indeed an expensive chair, but I’ve found it to be totally worthwhile after all those years in pain.
I can’t believe I waited this long to prioritize having a workday without physical pain. I heart you, Freedom chair." I'm in the same boat—and chair, ha ha!—as Jacqui since I also rock a Humanscale Freedom with headrest and swivel arms. I came to it in a different fashion, though. I have always been a fan of expensive chairs. My parents bought me a Neutral Posture E-series chair as my high school graduation present, and I sat in that thing from 1996 to 2008, dragging it through three major moves. It outlasted a half-dozen desks and computers before I finally donated it to that big office surplus store in the sky. The Humanscale Freedom has been a worthy replacement, and if anything, it's even more comfortable now than when I got it five years ago. I spend most of the day fully reclined, but the no-levers design means that when I want to sit forward, the chair leans with me. The spring is tensioned just right so that I can keep any position comfortably. I have to echo Jacqui's closing words: I heart you, Freedom chair.