You sit too much. It’s an allegation we’ve all heard from our parents and grandparents during a childhood of playing video games, but as with many nuggets of parental wisdom we dismissed with an eye roll, they were right. 

Not only can sitting perpetuate the bad postural habits associated with lower back pain, but research also points to excessive sitting as a driver for many chronic diseases.

And so came the concept of a standing desk -- a multi-positional workspace theoretically enabling the user to work comfortably while standing. I’ve certainly done my fair share of standing at a regular desk (this was the penalty of getting to the university library past 12 o’clock during finals week), but I’ve never used one designed this way on purpose. 

As such, when I was offered the opportunity to try out Flexispot’s latest E7 Pro model, I was eager to find out whether you could actually work comfortably with one of these things.
 

Comfort while standing is indeed a hard sell. Maybe you consistently drew the short straw at the library like me. Perhaps you recall being ordered to stand up in school for talking, spending the remainder of the lesson scribbling away at maths questions with an aching back and sore neck.

Thankfully, standing desks are far removed from these unpleasant experiences. With the E7 model, you’re given a fine adjuster for height with a range of 58 to 123 cm. It also functions as a seated desk too, of course, enabling you to program both a standing and seated position personalized to your height. There are also 4 programmable memory presets allowing access to customizable positions on the fly, as well as an anti-collision function to prevent the system from crushing items below or above it.

These functions are facilitated through a sleek module on the right-hand side of the desk. It features a glossy user interface and touch controls, and adjusting the desk is as satisfying as it is hassle-free. In fact, the whole unit oozes high quality. Thanks to sturdy steel design and the dual motors, it glides with the sort of precision and elegance we marvel at in those automated apartments none of us will ever be able to afford -- where mechanized blinds slide smoothly open and television screens emerge from hidden compartments, Flexispots’s desks would fit right in. 

It’s a great-looking product, too: my model features a smooth, matt black surface to match its minimalist yet robust ergonomics, and the concave front enables you to comfortably utilize the entire area of the desk. Its wires are also hidden away under a metal panel so as not to add to what is already a mess of computer cables (if your under-desk space is anything like mine).

You get two routed-out holes for cables which are appreciated, although I’d rather have two in the middle rather than them residing on the peripheral partitions of the desk. For such an elegant piece of furniture, it would’ve been better to be able to obscure all the cables with holes in the middle -- where most people's monitors would obscure them.

This is also quite a large desk, coming in at 142cm by 71cm. Personally, I love the extra workspace, but it’s something to consider for those who are short on space.

I was somewhat dreading putting the desk together, but thankfully, building the desk was incredibly straightforward on account of its modular design. The whole lifting mechanism only consists of a small number of metal parts, so I managed to put the thing together in around half an hour. 

So, what about using it? Standing while you play games, write, or read certainly takes some getting used to, but I found it to be an overall comfortable experience. I didn’t get the associated neck and shoulder pain I sometimes got from sitting too long, and surprisingly, I actually felt I could work for longer.

Not that I’ll never use the seated function, but it’s great to have the option to promote healthy posture when performing tasks you do every day. I commend Flexispot for pushing postural health through high-quality products -- an important area of our health the majority of us neglect to consider. 

Linden Garcia,
Editor, NoobFeed