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(inspiring music) (phone clicks) (keypad clicks) Okay, have you ever felt tension in your shoulders, your arms, or your back after working at a cluttered desk all day? Here is the great news. You could avoid this problem by simply making adjustments to your workspace. Limited space on the work surface may cause other people to place devices in undesirable positions that are hard to reach, and this placement may lead to awkward postures as you reach for a mouse or you look for a monitor that is supposed to be placed to the side, and your work surface depth should also allow you to view the monitor at a distance of at least about 20 inches or 50 centimeters, and position the monitor to achieve the appropriate viewable angle, which is generally just directly right in front of you. Hard, angled leading edges that come in contact with the user's arm or wrist can really create contact stress. See, it affects the nerves and the blood vessels in that area of the body that contacts it, and possibly it causes some other signs and symptoms like tingling and sore fingers. Now, just minimize that contact stress by using a simple wrist rest or padding, padding the table edges, or even, if you're gonna make these table edges customized, you could even just make sure that whoever is making them grinds that off at an ergonomically correct edge, and that'll avoid all of those complications. If you feel like the space under your desk is inappropriate, it's probably because the work surface was designed poorly or there's just too much excessive clutter. Regardless of the reason, it can still result in discomfort and performance inefficiencies such as fatigue, circulation restrictions, and contact stress due to constriction of movement and the inability to frequently change your feet's positions or your legs' positions, and it's all going to start to lead to this, this problem with the MSDs. And so, get the stuff out from underneath your desks, make sure you have the amount of space that is required for you to be able to move properly and sit in a neutral position, and you'll probably be able to avoid most of those problems. If you're ever working on a project that requires you to have documents near your monitors, sometimes if those documents are positioned too far away from the monitor itself, it may require some really awkward head postures or frequent movements of your head and your neck to look from the monitor to the document, document back to the monitor, and those awkward postures can really lead to some great muscle fatigue and discomfort problems of not only your neck, not only your shoulders, but even your head itself, leading you to headaches and other acute or chronic problems. To fix this problem, just simply place the documents at or about the same height and the distance as the monitor screen itself. A document holder can be positioned directly beneath the monitor and that's going to allow you to keep the same neutral posture while simply your eyes move back and forth and do the majority of the work for you. This is really gonna cut down on the excessive awkward movements and it's probably gonna save you a lot of discomfort and a lot of pain. In most offices, we all have a phone and something as simple as a phone can cause a great deal of pain and injury if it's not used properly. Placing the telephone too far away from you can cause you to be repeatedly reaching and then resulting in a strain of the shoulder, the arm, or the neck. And talking on the phone with the handset pinched between your shoulder and your head, you know that's wrong, so it could easily cause you to have stress and neck pain. Well, you can easily fix this problem by placing the telephone at a comfortable distance depending on usage patterns. And this will minimize your repeated reaching, it's gonna help reduce the possibility of the injury, and if you plan on spending a lot of time on the phone, simply use the speakerphone option, if it's good enough, or maybe invest in a hands-free headset. All of that is going to really help you tremendously.
Proper placement of items on the desk can help reduce injury from excessive reaching, poor posture, and repetitive actions.