Couple of months ago, I started looking for a new desk for my home office. Changes in my project caused me to work from home a lot. Also, a colleague told me about how great a vertically adjustable desk is for his health. “It simply is the difference between backache and no backache.” After researching the topic, I decided to buy a Hammerbacher XDSM for 751,75€. In this article, I want to present my thoughts, the options, why I choose the XDSM and if it was the right decision to invest such an amount of money.

Motivation and attributes

The dimensions of the desk were quite fixed by the size of my office: 1600 mm x 800 mm.

Also, I wanted an electrically vertically adjustable desk, not a manual adjustable one. I read that you should change standing and seated position every 20 minutes. I don’t want to operate a crank three times in one hour. Turns out that is a really important thing. I often adjust my desk to standing position when my phone rings and I’m beginning a longer call. I sure wouldn’t want to crank it up, already speaking.

Somewhere, I found a table where body heights were mapped to the recommended height of desks. That’s where I got the target height of 1.21 meters from.

As mentioned earlier, I wanted to switch between the states of the desk as easy as possible. That includes a memory function that saves different heights and automatically stops when the desired height is reached. With such a function, you simply have to hold a button until the desk doesn’t move any more. In retrospect, that function makes me use the adjustment significantly more often. Most of the desks have a smooth start/stop function that makes the desk accelerate and break smoothly without sloshing your coffee all over the desk.

Since my first computer, I lived with having cables all over my desk, behind my desk, hanging from the desk to the ground … I just didn’t care. Because of the wisdom I gained from my age and less tolerance for disorder, I opted for additional cable ducts and a vertical cable spiral that holds my cables in check. Also, these two additions are a must if your desk is standing in the middle of the room and you can see its back. It just looks very nice if there aren’t hanging cables all over the place.

Because I want to support local companies, I also looked for desks built in Germany.

Options

With those attributes in mind, I researched the web for some hours and came up with the following options:

Note: 751,75€ = desk itself + 55€ cable spiral + 75€ optional cable duct - 3% off because of prepayment

Decision

I ordered the XDSM because of the many advantages. As you can see, it’s the only desk that fulfilled all my wishes and is cheaper than some other desks that don’t offer as much as the XDSM does.

Desk in Action

It’s recommended to switch your sitting / standing position every 20 minutes. In the first couple of days, I noticed that I have been standing instead of sitting at the desk nearly the whole day. That normalized after a while. Now, I’m standing during every Skype-meeting or telephone call, also when doing something creative like drawing diagrams. I usually sit while programming and debugging. It seems that sitting is the right posture when focusing on something and standing is the right thing to do when being creative.

The gentle hum of adjusting my desk is noticeable by my colleagues at the other end of a telephone / Skype call, but not disturbing. That makes changing the position during long calls possible.

All in all, I immediately would buy my desk again. My back is better than before and I am more productive because I can switch to standing position when getting tired. Just moving in small steps to both sides is enough to get me focused again.

TL;DR

Get a vertically adjustable desk. I recommend the Hammerbacher XDSM.