You may wonder why anyone would want to spend money buying an extra keyboard. It seems strange when new PCs generally come with what look like a perfectly decent keyboards.

The answer is that, in some circumstances, keyboards are health hazards. They can inflict pain and, in extreme cases, cause long-term physical damage.

But buying a new ergonomic keyboard isn’t straightforward.

Keyboards can hurt you

Typing injuries were called RSI (repetitive strain injuries) but are now generally described as occupational overuse syndrome or OOS.

Some people believe the business is just a worker compensation rort, but there’s plenty of evidence that keyboard OOS injuries are real. They affects thousands of Australians and New Zealanders every year.

In medical terms the pains might be tendonitis or tenosynovitis.

Both start mildly, with plenty of early warning signs. However, things can quickly turn nasty. In severe cases you could end up with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS), a squeezing of the median nerve as it runs into hand.

If you reach this point, you won’t be capable of typing.

Some poorly designed keyboards are particularly bad because they cause wrists to twist unnaturally. Of course posture, desk and seating height are important – possibly more important than keyboard design  – it might pay to look at adjusting these before investing in an ergonomic keyboard.

Is your mouse worse?

Ergonomics experts warn PC mice can cause more problems than keyboards. If you do a lot of typing, it’s a good idea to learn keyboard short cuts to cut down on mouse use.

New computers usually come with a traditional ’straight’ keyboard. Some manufacturers might describe these as ergonomic, but generally the term is for keyboards that better accommodate the human body.

One ergonomic improvement is to split the conventional keyboard down the middle and then angle the two halves outward. This is particularly helpful for people with broad shoulders as it enables them to hold their wrists at a more comfortable angle.

People with narrow shoulders often find a straight keyboard is preferable. Most split keyboards come with a fixed angle, but some are adjustable and others can even be broken apart.

Another improvement is to have a raised area in front of the keys where you can rest the heels of the palms of your hands. Many laptops are designed this way – it’s better than early designs where the keys started at the front of the case. It is possible to buy separate wrist rests; they come in a variety of designs including rubberised material and gel-filled rests.

Other physical designs include specially recessed keys and giving each key more or less travel – that is the distance that it moves up and down. Some people prefer more travel and audible ‘click’; others are comfortable with silence and a softer touch.

A keyboard with the wrong kind of response will affect your productivity.

Spacing is important

Make sure that the size and spacing of keys is right for the size of your hands.

If you have small hands then smaller keys, bunched fairly closely together will be more comfortable. Some people like small keyboards because they use up less desk space – but it isn’t wise to work in cramped conditions.

Netbooks and laptops are a problem. It may pay to add an external keyboard to these computers when working at home.

Beyond QWERTY

There are keyboards that abandon the familiar QWERTY pattern altogether:

• The Dvorak pattern, which claims to be more efficient and therefore less painful.
• Chording keyboards allow you to use key combinations to create letters. Since your fingers stay on the same keys all the time there’s less chance of RSI.

The problem with both is that you’ll need to relearn your typing skills and you’ll experience difficulty if you ever work at another computer.

The trouble might not be the keyboard but its place on your desk. Generally it should be set slightly lower than the average desk height. Some workplaces use keyboard trays that sit slightly below the desk. The best ones are height adjustable. Most desk trays also allow you to adjust the slope of the keyboard – counter-intuitively experts recommend that if the keyboard slopes at all, it should slope backwards.

Other keyboard trays are detachable and can rest on your lap. A smart alternative is to use a cordless keyboard on your lap.

Watch out for wireless keyboards and mice

People typically have far more trouble with cordless devices than with the corded variety. That’s because they are battery-powered and get progressively harder to use as the batteries run down. If you’re experiencing problems, you can able to solve things quickly simply by moving back to a cord connected mouse and keyboard.

So, is an ergonomic keyboard essential or not?

Yes and no. The most essential thing is to find a comfortable, reliable keyboard. For years I used an ergonomic keyboard and mouse yet still suffered from occasional pains. That’s because they were wireless devices. The pains went away for ever when I ditched the wireless keyboard and mouse for the flat, but cabled keyboard that came with my computer and invested $40 in a brand new ergonomic, yet cabled mouse. They’re not as cool as the wireless alternatives, but they are reliable and comfortable. That’s more important.

One last tip; if you’re in serious pain, try voice recognition software. It’s far from perfect and you will need to do some keyboarding, yet it has reached the point where it works well enough to rest sore hands.

Ergonomic Web Sites

Typing injuries

www.tifaq.com/

Includes details on alternatives to conventional keyboards and why you may want to use them.

British RSI FAQ

www.rsi-uk.org.uk/faq.txt

A bare-bones backgrounder to keyboard injuries and RSI.

Carnegie Mellon University Computer Related Repetitive Strain Injuries

www.cmu.edu/rsi/

This useful information site tells you who is at risk, how to avoid keyboard injuries and what to do if they arise.

Healthy Computing

www.healthycomputing.com

Wide-ranging site looking at a variety of computer health-related issues. There’s a good section on ergonomic issues for kids.

Next time you drive through the CBD late at night, notice how many offices are brightly lit. You’ll probably notice a lot are.

• A handful might be businesses like call centres, newspapers or IT operations that routinely work night shifts.
• In some cases the offices might be being cleaned.
• Other may be empty. Some companies like to light their offices at night as a gesture of solidarity with global warming deniers. Way to go boys.

Yet even from a moving car you maybe able to spot CBD offices housing a surprisingly large number of people are still working.

The last time I drove through my local city I noticed exactly that and this was at around midnight. I know from experience that the situation is similar in cities around the world.

People are working longer hours

Of course, long hours are not unusual for knowledge workers. They are particularly common among younger people in their late teens and early twenties. But it happens right across all age ranges.

Surveys show that the average working week for a full time employee in New Zealand is now around 44 hours. Twenty percent of employees regularly work more than 50 hours a week.

New Zealand isn’t different from other countries.

Given that a sizeable section of the workforce still works shifts or fixed hours and that there are still many clock-watchers who race out of the door at 5.00pm or 5.30pm this means that for committed workers the average working week is considerably longer.

At a guess I’d say readers of this column are more likely to average 48 hours a week.

But that’s only an average. Some will work more than that.

Work marathons are not a problem

I’m certain we’ve all pulled the occasional marathon work session or two. Over short periods these are not a problem.

However, over the long term, if excessive work hours are not strictly controlled they can lead to serious health issues and other major problems in the workplace. Not to mention grave conflicts with those increasingly rare parts of our lives that happen away from work.

Things aren’t as bad today as they were at the height of the dotcom frenzy, but there are still plenty of people who habitually work 12 to 16 hour days. And for people in cities like Sydney or London they often have to commute long distances before and after work.

Most people who work long hours do so because of real work pressures – for example you may be struggling to meet deadlines. This should be occasional rather than the norm. Frequent long hours are usually a sign that something is badly wrong at your workplace. Aprat from anything else, it’s quiet possible your employer is not playing fair with staffing levels. And that means you are being exploited.

Twisted workplace culture

We’ve all seen companies that demand or extract long hours because of a twisted culture. I’ve certainly worked in places where there has been some complicated game of chicken going on, with employees competing to show management who is the most loyal and dedicated worker by staying in the office later and later.

Of course these employers might argue that there’s a severe skills shortage so existing workers need to do more. There’s an element of truth. But on the other hand, abusing something rare and precious is a perverse way to run a business.

No doubt some employees feel pressure to work long hours in order to save their jobs in a recession. And yes, there are employers only too willing to exploit this fear.

The knowledge worker credo says that you simply don’t have to put up with that kind of nonsense. Even in a global recession. In the good times there’s always another employer who needs your skills. So if you are pressured to regularly work excessive hours – and in my opinion excessive hours is more than 50 hours a week sustained over a long period – then you have every reason to walk. Even in the bad times you can often find a better deal.

Now I have to be careful writing about this kind of issue. The last time I touched on something similar I received large amounts of angry and abusive email from readers who think looking after oneself is strictly for sissies. So we’ll all doff our caps in reverence to the sheer manliness of the hardened macho types and remind ourselves of two truths about long hours.

• First, sustained long hours are not healthy. Period. If you continue to work around the clock you will damage your body. You almost certainly won’t be getting enough exercise. There’s a good chance you won’t be eating properly. And you probably won’t be giving yourself enough downtime.
• Second, there’s a lot of scientific evidence that long working hours are simply not productive.

We’ll look closer at both these issues another time. For now, ask yourself if all the hours you work are necessary. Even if the only pressures are self-imposed, you might want to evaluate your relationship with your employer in terms of the hours you spend working.

Three knowledge worker blog posts with interesting (or alarming) perspectives:

How to Measure Knowledge Worker Productivity

Jon Miller from the Lean Manufacturing Blog suspects knowledge workers might be more productive if they laugh more often. There’s almost certainly something in this. I recently sat through a seminar in Auckland run by someone promoting much the same message (her name escapes me).

Are Intellectual Knowledge workers eventually prone to Alzheimer’s?

I suspect the best way to read this story from the Smart Economy blog is to view it as a wake up call. It basically says knowledge work makes you fat (the post uses the word obese, but let’s forget the euphemisms) and at the same time there’s a link between obesity (which sounds better in this sentence than ‘fatness’) and neuro-degeneration.

To Learn Lists – What My Grandfather Taught Me

Developing To Learn Lists sounds like a great idea to me. It’s not that new a concept, the Design of Knowledge’s author Bill Brantley  got it from Benjamin Franklin via his own grandfather. Basically, write down a list of things you want to know, then go and study them. Like the ideas it’s extremely simple. (To Learn Lists have been all over the Internet in recent weeks, this post has the ring of authenticity even if it isn’t the original source.)