A laptop on a dining table is a laptop at the wrong height with the wrong keyboard in the wrong light. It is fine for an afternoon and genuinely damaging over a year. Fixing it is neither difficult nor expensive.
The single most important change
Get the screen up to eye level. A laptop screen sits roughly 30cm too low, which means your neck is bent forward for eight hours a day. Either add an external monitor at the right height, or put the laptop on a stand and use an external keyboard and mouse. Both work; doing neither does not.
A sensible order of spending
| Priority | Item | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chair with lumbar support | You are in it for eight hours; nothing else comes close |
| 2 | External monitor (24-27 inch) | Fixes screen height and doubles your working area |
| 3 | External keyboard and mouse | Lets the laptop sit at the right height |
| 4 | Desk lamp | Screen glare and eye strain are largely a lighting problem |
| 5 | Headset with a decent microphone | Everyone on the call will notice |
Monitors: what actually matters
A 24-inch 1080p panel is the practical minimum and perfectly good. A 27-inch 1440p is noticeably better for spreadsheets and design work — the extra resolution means more usable space rather than just a bigger picture. Make sure it has a height-adjustable stand, or budget for a separate arm; a monitor at the wrong height solves nothing.
Light and sound
- Never put the screen directly in front of a window — you will fight glare all day. Perpendicular to the window is ideal.
- Match the room brightness to the screen brightness. A bright screen in a dark room is a headache by 4pm.
- For calls, soft furnishings help more than any microphone upgrade. A rug and curtains kill most of the echo.
The twenty-minute rule
Every twenty minutes, look at something twenty feet away for twenty seconds. It sounds trivial and it substantially reduces eye strain. Set a reminder for the first fortnight until it becomes automatic.
We rent monitors, docking stations and full desk setups alongside laptops, so a complete work-from-home configuration can arrive on one delivery. If you are setting up a remote team and want identical kit at every desk, that is exactly the sort of thing we handle.
- Work From Home
- Ergonomics
- Monitors
- Setup
