Set up your chair in a minute: elbows, knees, feet

An office chair has levers most people have never touched — they sit in it however it was set when unboxed, or however the previous owner left it. Yet the wrong chair height is a quiet source of lower back, shoulder, and wrist pain: you either hunch down toward the keyboard, hike your shoulders up, or your feet dangle. Getting it right isn't a job for physical therapists — it's three checkpoints you can fix in a minute and verify in ten seconds.

How to do it

1. Elbows: sit at your desk with your arms relaxed at your sides, forearms resting on the surface. Your elbows should form roughly a right angle, with your shoulders dropped, not hunched up toward your ears. If your shoulders are raised, the chair is too low; if you're leaning down to the desk, it's too high. Since most desks aren't height-adjustable, elbow position gets tuned via chair height instead.
2. Feet: they need to sit flat on the floor. If they're dangling after you've adjusted your elbows, don't lower the chair — prop your feet up instead (a footrest, a box, a thick book). Dangling feet press the front edge of the seat into your thighs and push you to slide forward.
3. Knees: roughly a right angle, hips slightly higher than knees. There should be about a palm's width of space between the front edge of the seat and the back of your knees.
4. If the chair has lumbar support, slide it into the curve of your lower back — it should support your back, not push into it. And actually use the backrest: perching on the front edge with no support tires your back fastest.
5. A quick check any time later: shoulders down? feet on the floor? forearms level? Three questions, ten seconds.

That covers the bottom half of your workstation. The top half — monitor height — is handled by the tip top edge of the monitor at eye level; the two setups complement each other, and one without the other falls short.

A typical scenario

An accountant working from home complained of pain between her shoulder blades and tingling in her fingers. An ergonomics check that took a minute revealed the classic setup: chair too low, shoulders hiked up all day, wrists bent upward. After raising the seat two inches and propping up her feet, the pain faded within a couple of weeks — no new chair, no physical therapy, just correctly using levers that had been there the whole time.

What you get out of it

Less fatigue and less pain for zero investment — you're just adjusting what you already own. You'll feel the effect within days, because your body stops spending hours compensating for bad geometry. And once you've learned the one-minute check, it applies to every chair you'll ever sit in: at the office, working from home, or at a cabin.

Pro tip

Set armrests so your relaxed, dropped elbows just barely touch them. If they're too high, they push your shoulders up; if they get in the way of pulling the chair up to the desk, it's better to lower them or remove them entirely — the desk surface will support your forearms instead, which is perfectly fine.