Improve Your Productivity by Improving your Work Habits!

Developing good work habits can set you up for years of productive, pain free work and recreation using computers.  Following proper ergonomic principles will ensure your productivity is maximized without sacrificing your health.  Here are some quick tips that involve your work habits:

• Vary tasks and break up repetitive routine tasks: Learn to pace yourself with any activity you are doing that involves physical movement or static body postures. Excessive, frequent, repetitive movement is not good for any joint. Likewise, keeping your joints in the same position, especially in a weight bearing position (as in sitting or standing), places strain on the joint and ligaments. A combination of movement and static posture at various times is best for your body.
• Take frequent breaks - stand up, stretch, walk around: If you need to be working at the computer for long periods of time, make time to get up and move around. Stand up, stretch and breathe in deeply. Movement allows for muscles and tissues to reposition, and for blood to flow freely. Moving around will also help with reducing fatigue and improve your energy and endurance.
• Shift your posture frequently: Changes in seated posture for working can be extremely beneficial. While working, move from resting on the backrest of the chair into a more upright and forward flexed position (closer to the work surface), place your feet at different places on the floor, move your seated position on the bottom of the chair etc. Small changes in position while you are sitting working can alter weight bearing and reduce the pressure or strain on specific joints and muscle groups.
• Joint movement exercises: Active large movements of your joints has significant benefits to increasing blood flow, reducing pressure areas and reducing muscle and joint strain. If possible, during rest and movement periods away from the keyboard, do some large range movement of your arms, hands, neck and legs.

Our Custom Typing Training web site includes a complete section on ergonomics.  To go directly to our ergonomics section, click on the link below:

http://www.customtyping.com/tutorials/erg/ergonomics.htm

Tip of the Week: Give yourself More Room to Work

As you are doing your work, do you find that you constantly have to switch back and forth between your email reader, word processor, web browser, or other programs?  Wouldn't it be nice to be able to fit more information on the screen to avoid having to switch between windows so often?  Windows does provide a way to squeeze more information into less space, without having to buy a bigger monitor.  It's called the Display Control Panel.  To access it, right-click anywhere on your desktop and choose "Properties".  Or, from the Start menu, choose "Display" from the list of control panels (it may be under "Appearance and Themes" if you are a Windows XP user).

Once you've opened the Display Control Panel, click on the "Settings" tab, move the slider for the screen resolution to the right, then click on "OK".  All of your text and windows will "shrink", and you will now have more room to work.

A couple of tips:

• Don't panic if your screen goes dark after changing the setting.  If this happens, it is because your monitor is not able to display the resolution you've chosen.  Windows works around this problem by asking you for confirmation before making the settings change permanent.  If you don't click on the "yes" button that Windows displays, your display will return to the old setting.
• Try playing around with different screen resolutions.  To avoid eye strain, make sure not to set the resolution so high that you cannot comfortably read the text.

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For further information about our products and services, visit us online at www.customsolutions.us.