Standing desk schedule

This standing desk schedule turns your working hours into a plan of sitting, standing and moving blocks that you can follow through the day. It starts from Cornell University’s 20-8-2 guidance, adjusts it to how used to standing you are, and works around lunch and any meetings you add. Along the way it answers a question that has no neat answer: how long should you stand at a standing desk?

How the standing desk schedule works

You enter up to four things:

• Your hours. When you start and finish. The default is 9:00 to 17:00.
• Lunch. On by default, 30 minutes from 12:30. Lunch doesn’t count as desk time.
• How used to standing you are. Three levels, explained below.
• Fixed meetings, if you like. Give each one a start, a length, and whether you sit or stay on your feet.

The planner fills each free stretch of the day with half-hour cycles: sit, then stand, then move for 2 minutes. Before a meeting or lunch it fits a shorter cycle into the gap. After a sitting meeting of 20 minutes or more, the next stretch starts on your feet rather than with more sitting. You get a timeline of the day, the pattern for each part of it, and your totals for sitting, standing and moving.

Where the numbers come from

The pattern comes from Alan Hedge at Cornell University, who recommends 20 minutes sitting, 8 minutes standing and 2 minutes “standing and moving (gentle stretching, walking etc.)” as a “ball park goal”. Over a 7.5-hour day, not counting lunch, that adds up to 5 hours sitting, 2 hours standing and half an hour moving, and he adds that the numbers “aren’t hard and fast” (Hedge, Cornell). Treat it as guidance from an experienced ergonomist, not a tested prescription.

The three levels keep that half-hour cycle and change how much of it you stand. They are anchored to an expert statement for desk-based workers, of which Hedge was a co-author. It suggests building up to 2 hours a day of standing and light activity during working hours at first, and eventually 4 hours, prorated for part-time hours (Buckley et al., 2015).

Level	In each half hour	On your feet in a 7.5-hour day
New to standing at work	Sit 22 min, stand 6, move 2	2 hours
Used to short spells	Sit 20 min, stand 8, move 2 (Cornell’s 20-8-2)	2 hours 30 minutes
Used to standing for longer	Sit 14 min, stand 14, move 2	4 hours

The authors note that their recommendations rest mostly on observational studies and short-term trials. The splits for the first and third levels are our arithmetic to hit those two targets, not something a trial has tested.

Why half an hour? Cornell says ergonomists have long recommended breaking up sitting with standing and moving, preferably for 1 to 2 minutes every 20 to 30 minutes (Cornell). And in a small trial, 23 office workers with overweight or obesity who switched between sitting and standing every 30 minutes for five days in a simulated office reported less fatigue and lower back discomfort than when they sat all day, with no loss of productivity (Thorp et al., 2014).

How long should you stand at a standing desk?

Nobody has found an ideal ratio of sitting to standing. What the research does suggest is to stand in short spells rather than long ones.

• Two hours in one go is too long for most. In a lab study, 20 adults did two hours of computer work standing up. Discomfort rose in every part of the body, and reaction time and mood got worse, though creative problem-solving improved (Baker et al., 2018).
• About 40 minutes is a reasonable ceiling. A review of 25 lab studies with 591 people estimated that lower back symptoms reached a clinically relevant level after 71 minutes of standing without a break, and after 42 minutes in people who tend to develop pain when standing. The authors suggest not standing for longer than 40 minutes at a time (Coenen et al., 2017).
• All day on your feet has its own risks. Across 49 studies of standing at work, standing for more than 4 hours a workday was linked with lower back symptoms. The authors call this tentative, because most of the studies were snapshots in time (Coenen et al., 2018). Cornell adds that standing is more tiring than sitting and that prolonged standing at work raises the risk of varicose veins (Cornell).

So no level asks you to stand for more than 14 minutes at a stretch, and if you add a meeting on your feet that lasts more than 40 minutes, the planner flags it.

Standing is not exercise

Standing uses only a little more energy than sitting. A meta-analysis of 46 studies put the difference at 0.15 kcal a minute: swapping 6 hours of sitting for standing would use about 54 extra kcal a day for a 65 kg person (Saeidifard et al., 2018). Cornell’s advice is plain: “Simply standing is insufficient. Movement is important” (Cornell).

That is why every cycle ends with 2 minutes of moving: refilling your water, walking to the printer, or one short stretch. The desk break timer can suggest one from the app, and desk stretches has the seated cat-cow. Whether such small doses add up is the subject of what are exercise snacks?

Does a standing desk help?

It helps you sit less, at least at first. In a Cochrane review, sit-stand desks cut sitting at work by about 100 minutes a workday in the first three months and by about 57 minutes at three to twelve months. The evidence was low quality, and there was none beyond a year (Shrestha et al., 2018).

The effect on pain is smaller. A meta-analysis of eight studies found a small reduction in low back discomfort among pain-free workers using sit-stand desks, and the authors noted a lack of studies in people who already have back pain (Agarwal et al., 2018).

The catch is using the desk at all. In Cornell’s field studies, people with sit-stand desks stood for 15 minutes or less a day in total, and other studies found most people back to sitting all the time after a month (Cornell). A plan with times on it is one way to keep the desk going up and down. For the bigger question, read are standing desks worth it?

Before you start

• Set both heights. Sitting or standing, the desk goes at about elbow height. The desk height calculator gives a starting point for each.
• Raise the screen when you stand. Cornell warns that if the desk goes up and the screen doesn’t, you end up bending your neck to look at it (Cornell). See how to set up your monitor.
• Move up a level when the one you are on feels easy, and go back down if your feet, legs or back ache. The levels are a rough guide, not a course you have to finish.

What the schedule can’t do

It doesn’t know your job, your feet or your back, and it can’t tell you the right ratio for you, because nobody knows it yet. The numbers are guidance from ergonomists and an expert group, not results from trials that compared schedules. Nor does standing replace breaks from the screen: HSE’s advice on short, frequent breaks still applies, whether you sit or stand (HSE). The guide to microbreaks has more on that. If sitting or standing hurts, lower back pain from sitting explains when to see a doctor.

If you want the moving blocks to be more than a walk to the kettle, Bavelu’s desk routines of two to four minutes are designed and filmed by physiotherapists.