(Total read time: 8 minutes)

In this post I’ll cover how I identified the best high-end chairs in the world, which I ultimately chose, and the tangible results that followed.

In January of 2005, I found myself on a veranda in Panama after the usual afternoon rain, dreaming of the upcoming year and reflecting on lessons learned since leaving the US. Maria Elena, the matriarch of the Panamanian family that had adopted me, sipped her iced tea and pointed at my bruised feet:

“Tim, let me share some advice I was once given. Buy the most comfortable bed and pair of shoes you can afford. If you’re not in one, you’ll be in the other.”

I followed her advice upon returning to CA and the results were sudden: Plantar Fasciitis disappeared, as did shoulder impingement after switching from coil-spring to foam-layered mattresses.

But what about chairs? On January 4th, 2009, I tweeted out the following:

“Is the Aeron chair worth it? http://tr.im/2uxd Do you have any fave chairs for extended sitting and writing?”

…

Even though I’m financially comfortable now, I didn’t grow up spending a lot of money, which I’m thankful for. To this day, I’ve never paid for first-class airfare for myself. Not that it isn’t worth it — I just can’t do it. Similarly, I had trouble believing a chair could possibly be worth $850-$1,200, but my back pain led me to pose the question to the omniscient Interweb.

How did others feel?

More than 95% of Aeron users replied with “yes, absolutely”, but it wasn’t the only chair with a cult-like following.

Four of the five are manufactured by Herman Miller (HM) and Humanscale (HS). Prices are from Amazon, as are the star reviews, but discounts of $200-400 can be negotiated with dealers. Both eBay and Craiglist offer similar discounts.

In descending order of popularity:

1. Aeron (Fully loaded) (HM) – $879 (1 review; average review: 5 stars)
Used at NASA mission control and tech start-ups worldwide.

2. Mirra (fully loaded) (HM) – $829 (14 reviews; average review: 4.5 stars) Note: the Herman Miller sales representatives I spoke with preferred the Mirra seat feel for shorter legs vs. the Aeron. Easier to adjust: Mirra is about 9 revolutions from loosest to tightest settings; Aeron is 40+.

3. SwingChair – $495 Recommended by a strong contingent of writers, including one of my favorite visual storytellers, Kathy Sierra.

I like the design concept, but I would suggest other forms of “core exercise”.

4. Liberty (HS) – $899 (6 reviews; average review: 3.5 stars)

5. Freedom Task Chair with Headrest (HS) – $999.99 (1 review, average: 4 stars) Used at the FBI and by other governmental agencies with three-letter acronyms.

6. Embody – $1,800 list price (negotiated with dealer: $1,200-1,300): Basis of chair design – sitting is bad; movement is good. Even in locked position, it still has some backward flex at the top position. No forward tilt option.

For personal testing, I also added a Swiss-ball chair (Isokinetics Balance Ball Chair – $75) to the mix, as seen below:

3 Key Findings

Surprisingly, the Isokinetics chair is more comfortable than most fixed chairs I tested, though there is some minor… ahem… testicular compression that isn’t nearly as pleasant as it sounds. If you don’t have jewels to worry about, this chair could well be an ideal cost-effective choice.

The chair I most wanted to test was the Mirra, which seems to have the best combination of price point (bought used or via eBay) and multiple 5-star reviews. Not to mention it’s also the name of one of the best BMXers of all time. But I digress.

In the end, I bought a used C-size (technically a bit too large for me) Aeron for $450 on Craigslist. I’m impatient and didn’t want to wait over the weekend to schedule sittings for other Herman Miller chairs with a certified dealer. Once I have some conclusive comparable data, I want closure.

Aeron sizing chart. I’m 5′ 8″ and 170 lbs., but the C works with no problem.

3 Personal Lessons:

1) The lumbar support is — by far — the primary determinant of comfort or pain. I’ve lowered this adjustment and found that maintaining the natural S-curve through pressure on the lower back is what prevents pain most consistently. Comfortable sitting time is now 7-8 hours vs. less than 2 hours, with no ill after-effects.

Sliding lumbar support on the Aeron.

2) Seat height (and secondarily, depth) will determine the rest.

If the flats of your feet don’t make complete contact with the floor, you will move your hips forward and slouch, eliminating the S-curve in the lower lumbar. If your seat is too low and your knees are above your hips, you will shorten the habitual range your hip flexors (negative neural adaptation) and end up with severe lower-back pain.

Aim to keep your hamstrings parallel to the floor, and if the seat is too long for your femur (thigh bone) — as is mildly the case with my C-size Aeron — just separate your knees a bit. If you’re not wearing a tight skirt, I’ve found a basketball of space between the knees to provide the best lateral stabilization, which reduces torso fatigue. Take off heels when sitting at a desk, lest you end up with hot calves and Quasimodo-like posture. Not good for mating. If you are wearing a tight skirt, I suggest taking up the Japanese tea ceremony and sitting on tatami side saddle. It’ll be more comfortable than crossing your legs all day.

Parallel hamstrings?! True, I’ve thought more about chairs in the last few weeks than anyone should, but I do it to save you the trouble. Benefit from my OCD so you can obsess on other things.

3) Using a 3′ long and 6″ diameter foam roller three times per day for 5 minutes can eliminate persistent middle-back pain from mediocre chair use; conversely, it can extend your comfortable sitting time by 30-40%.

A Visual Before and After

Knowledge workers often log more ass-in-seat time than sleep. Coders, in particular, are often subjected to a steady diet of Mountain Dew and hunching for 12+-hour marathons. I don’t put in these hours, but I found myself with severe mid-upper back pain from using a non-adjustable chair and craning over a desk that was too low, even for 30-60 minutes per day.

Two doctors suggested various therapies, but a quick experiment (placing a laptop on top of a dresser and writing while standing for two days) proved that posture was the problem.

In less than a week following my switch to the Aeron, all upper middle-back (lower trapezius, rhomboid major) pain disappeared completely. The results: better output during work and writing, faster and deeper sleep, and a huge smack on the forehead. Why the hell didn’t I do this earlier?

In my case, was it worth it at $450? Most definitely. Particularly looking at the value of time per hour and the lost income due to doctor visits, massage, etc., this is $450 I should have invested years ago.

Before:

After:

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Odds and Ends: Twitter Giveaway Winners

Coming soon! Patience, young Jedi. The travel bag and Fujitsu color travel scanner are gone. More giveaways coming here this week…

Through simple redesign of workspaces, Interpolis of Holland increased productivity 20%, and sick leave has dropped from 9% to 2.5%. Last but not least, their new design also brings in 90,000 visitors a year.

How was it done?

How do you create a Results-Only-Work-Environment (ROWE) for yourself or a company — and increase profits — by tweaking your surroundings?

The following is an exclusive excerpt from the new German hit “Morgen komm ich später rein” (Rough idiomatic translation: I’ll be coming in later tomorrow.), translated for you all by author and fellow reader Markus Albers, who also interviewed me for German Vanity Fair. Danke, Markus!

###

Thanks to a sophisticated office structure, the headquarters of Interpolis insurance in the Dutch town of Tilburg has freed up 51 percent of their working areas, cut 33 percent of construction and equipment costs, and reduced office usage expenses by 21 percent.

How it works: In the morning employees take their laptop and mobile phone and look for the workplace for the day. Documentation of joint projects and operations that were formerly located on the desk, are now replaced by common electronic folders and virtual databases, accessible for everybody.

The man behind this revolutionary and visionary concept of the 7000 square metre and “Tivoli” project was Gijs Nooteboom of the consulting firm Veldhoen + Company. In an interview, he explains to me why the Interpolis concept represents all future office building, the reasons why we will spend more time working from home and on travel and why offices are basically old-fashioned but still needed:

Mr. Nooteboom, what was the basic idea of your concept for the insurance company Interpolis?

Gijs Nooteboom: We represent the philosophy that every human being anywhere and at any time of day can work. The fact that you can not concentrate on personal jobs, but on activities. And that work can be focused and individual. Sometimes one works together – it can happen virtually or with physical presence. Based on the analysis of these activities, we design work environments. We do this for town halls, schools, hospitals, banks or insurances such as Interpolis.

Individual offices seem to play no role?

Nooteboom: No. Interpolis has open designed work floors and a large meeting floor: The Plaza,which was differently designed by artists. That’s where you can eat, drink coffee and discuss in large or small groups.

And every morning everybody hunts for his desk…

Nooteboom: The employees are released, so to speak, in environments where there is no separate desk, where you work almost paperless without standard office desks but several different ones – suitable for all kinds of activities. Furthermore you don’t have to come into the office daily. If you work individually, you can plan in advance and finish tasks at home, at the customer location, or on the beach.

But one still has to attend at the office every now and then?

Nooteboom: One should attend the Interpolice office – depending on the function – at least two to three days in office due to social cohesion. In contrast to the past, work is not measured on the presence, but output; The performance of the staff expected by the company. This is a fundamental change that requires time and training – amongst workers, but even more in the administration. What are the new tasks of the management ? No longer to check whether someone is there, but to define the output and control it. It takes months to incorporate this culture into a company.

A considerable effort. What are the benefits for the company?

Nooteboom: The company requires 50% less square meters. All cleaning and other maintenance costs will be reduced accordingly. In addition, Interpolis increased 20 percent in productivity through flexibility and sick leave, by nine percent 10 years ago, now dropped to two and a half percent. Thirdly, it is good for image and culture of the company – Interpolis receives 90,000 visitors a year. The office is marketing tool number one.

And what are the benefits for staff?

Nooteboom: The most important thing is freedom of choice: What to do when and where? You can freely decide on work time and place more or less, depending on the function. Secondly, it is now festive to come into the office. It is an open and transparent work space designed for meetings and exchange, much more so than in a standard office with long corridors and closed spaces.

How important is modern technology?

Nooteboom: It has to be state-of-the-art. In future virtual collaboration will be even easier and more intuitive than it is now. During the telephone call one will be able to see the image of each other, exchange data, show presentations and work together on documents. Therefore there will be less business travel than today.

Is the 9-to-5 working day a model of the past?

Nooteboom: It won’t be over that quickly, one reason beeing the schools which convey this rhythm, but in ten to 20 years a very large proportion of the working environments will be differently organized. One reason beeing globalization: If you are in contact with Asia or the United States one has to work either early in the morning or late evening.

Will we still need offices in the future?

Nooteboom: The concept of the office is basically old-fashioned, but we still need it. It will be used almost solely for meetings in the future. More and more companies will let their employees work from the home or while traveling.

Are we talking about a fad or a real trend?

Nooteboom: We are working on these concepts for companies and administrations for more than 15 years and the growth is enormous. Lately also because of environmental issues and sustainability. Dutch companies are increasingly aware that one should be in a traffic jam, if it is not required. Buildings should not be bigger than necessary but rather extremely functional.

My Home Office/Non-Office

My home “office” – more like a Zen garden with a desktop than an office. The framed quote is from world-famous cook Bobby Flay: “Take risks and you’ll get the payoffs. Learn from your mistakes until you succeed. It’s that simple.”

The three-association desktop: a gift from the CIA, a gift from a Japanese monk, and a quote to put into practice like religion.

I design a workplace like I design any space: by association and positive constraints.

First, I want positive emotional associations with each object within my visual field. Limiting associations is often better than careful selection. The greenhouse you see is essentially a private rain forest with automatic ion generators and timed water systems. It is entirely self-contained with eight sun roofs and no openings. This is the morning oxygenation chamber where I have breakfast. I love it.

Second, I limit misbehavior by limiting options. Notice that I have no shelves. This discourages accumulating papers and encourages both elimination and immediate digital note-taking. When in doubt, I take a digital photograph of documents (I prefer this to a scanner, which consumes real estate).

Don’t want to eat too much chocolate? Don’t put it in your house.

Don’t want to send too much e-mail? Force yourself to stand at an elevated desk vs. sitting in a comfortable Aeron chair. Don’t want to spend a lot of time filing? Eliminate a place to put the documents.

Constraints — a precursor to simplicity — aren’t always a bad thing. In fact, they’re often better than increasing options.

He interviewed me for Yahoo! Travel almost a year and a half ago, and I’m thrilled to have the chance to interview him about his long-awaited new book and the art of travel writing.

Have you ever wondered what it really takes to pull the trigger and embark on long-term world travel?
Have you ever fantasized about getting paid to do it?

Let Rolf give us a look at both…

Is Marco Polo Didn’t Go There a sequel of sorts to Vagabonding?

It is in a sense a sequel — as well as a prequel, of sorts — but it has a different approach than Vagabonding. Vagabonding is at heart a philosophical book about seeing time as wealth and using travel to actualize that wealth. Marco Polo Didn’t Go There is indirectly philosophical; it’s a collection of stories from the road — a showcase of the type of travel experiences that vagabonding has provided for me over the past decade.

So your new book might be considered “vagabonding in practice”?

In a sense, yes. That said, many of the stories are misadventures by conventional definition. In the pages of the new book, I’m always getting into trouble, or falling in with the wrong people, or getting lost somehow. But that’s how travel stories work. People quickly tire of hearing stories about your perfectly blissful days on the road. They want to hear about the times when things went wrong — when you were challenged in unexpected ways. So the new book is skewed toward my more harrowing and/or wacky adventures.

This book is also an examination of my working life as a travel writer. This is communicated in many ways throughout the book, but perhaps most vividly in the endnotes to each story, which comment on the ragged reality that lurks behind a seemingly self-contained travel tale. I like to think of these endnotes as the DVD-style “commentary track” to the book.

[Note from Tim: this "commentary track" is perhaps my favorite feature of all, as it explains the "making of" a first-class world traveler and all the real logistical and cultural challenges that presents. Highly recommended if you have any travel coming up.]

Misadventures aside, how might readers seek out the kinds of travel experiences you describe in the book? That is, how might your average traveler get out of the tourist-circuit rut and find interesting, life-affecting experiences?

The most important thing in seeking richer travel experiences is learning how to slow down. This can be hard to do, since as Americans we tend to micromanage everything to make things more efficient back home.

Travel isn’t about efficiency. It’s about leaving yourself open to new experiences. You can’t do this when you’re racing around on a strict itinerary. If you examine the truly life-affecting experiences I describe in my new book, you’ll find that they most all happened by accident. If you aren’t open to the unexpected — if you aren’t willing to get lost from time to time — you’ll be selling your travels short.

[Suggestion from Tim: reread the previous paragraph substituting "travel" and "travels" with "life".]

As for the tourist-circuit, slowing your travels down will automatically lead you off the tourist trail. When you aren’t racing from “attraction” to “attraction,” you’ll quickly discover that the best experiences come from the diversions along the way.

How has technology changed the way people travel? Any advice or warnings about using this technology on the road?

In 1994 I took an 8-month vagabonding journey around North America, and there were times when I was out of touch with friends and family for weeks. Nobody was on email back then, and making a long-distance call required a fist-full of quarters and a pay phone. Now, with high-speed Internet and the ubiquity of cell phones, you can never be out of touch. I never called my sister when I was traveling America in ’94, but just last month I was traveling Africa with an AT&T BlackJack and I needed to ask her a question, so I gave her a holler from Lokichokio, Kenya. Even for Kenyans, Lokichokio is the middle of nowhere, but calling her was not a problem. I just punched in her number and got her on the second ring.

The downside is that this kind of communication can easily become one big umbilical cord that ties you to home when you should be experiencing your travel surroundings. Was calling my sister from Kenya really all that urgent and necessary? Probably not. And in a sense I was probably less “in the moment” in Lokichokio than I should have been.

Ideally, you should only check email just one or two times a week when you travel, and use the cell phone only for emergencies or hooking up with local friends as you go. What’s the pleasure in going to Tahiti or Rio or Geneva if you spend most of your time attached to your phone or laptop, sending messages home?

By definition, being a travel writer means you’ve been working from a mobile office for ten years. What advice might you give to people looking manage their work from remote locations as they travel?

Be a minimalist. Reduce clutter. Obviously travel by its very nature is going to do this, since you can’t pack everything you’d keep in your home office. But this should apply to your travel office as well. For example, get a cheap laptop, and use it only for your work. Save your important information into Google documents (or something similar) in case the laptop gets lost or stolen or your pack falls in a river. Don’t use the laptop to surf news online; go to the local newsstand instead. Don’t use the laptop to watch DVDs or listen to music; go to a local cinema or nightclub instead.

This is not just a matter of travel aesthetics or cultural appreciation — it’s a matter of breaking bad habits. Back home we use our work technology to fart around and pass the day. Nobody should travel around the world just to sit in front of a laptop and fart around.

Travel writing as a profession would seem to be a glamorous undertaking. Is it as cool of a job as it sounds?

Absolutely — but not in the way you might think. There are better ways to travel than wandering around and taking notes and spending long stretches of time in your hotel doing typing prose. There are better ways to make money. There are better ways to get into adventures. Just read the endnotes to my new book and you’ll see the limitations and contradictions involved when you go to a place and try to write about it.

So the best part about my job isn’t that it enables me to travel; it comes in the work itself. It comes when I experience an amazing place or a memorable encounter and I’m later able to write something true about that experience — something that communicates the richness and complexity and possibility of being alive.

How did you start your travel writing career?

My writing aspirations can be traced back to about age 13, when I started writing horror stories in the style of Stephen King. This horror-writing phase didn’t last long, but it helped winnow the creative urge, and familiarize me with the basics of putting a prose narrative together. Later I became involved with my high school newspaper, and I wrote a humor column for my campus newspaper in college. After college, I traveled the United States for eight months, living out of a VW van. Fancying myself a kind of new Jack Kerouac, I tried to write a book about this travel experience, but that ultimately failed when I couldn’t interest any agents or editors. Out of money and not sure what to do next, I went to Korea to teach English for a couple years.

In Korea, I learned how to live within another culture, and I became a more seasoned, instinctive traveler. I also learned from the shortcomings of my failed USA travel book, and sharpened my writing, keeping in mind the narrative needs of my readers. During my second year in Korea, I rewrote one of my USA book chapters (about Las Vegas) and sold it to Salon.com’s travel section. Encouraged by this small success, I strengthened my relationship with my Salon editor by writing some travel stories about Korea. He published about five of them.

At this point, I’d saved a lot of money from teaching, and I’d planned on traveling through Asia and Europe for over a year. Since I had an editorial contact at Salon, I decided to pitch him with a travel column idea. He wasn’t sure about this idea at first, so I hit the road on my trip and continued to write stories. It just so happened that Leonardo DiCaprio was shooting the travel-oriented movie “The Beach” in Thailand, so I decided to try and sneak onto the set of the movie as an experiment about the motivations and idiosyncrasies of travel. My attempt to sneak onto the movie set failed, but the resulting story, “Storming ‘The Beach’”, made the cover of Salon and landed in the 2000 edition of The Best American Travel Writing [From Tim: Read this for a flavor of Rolf. You'll thank me.].

I got the travel column at Salon, and that turned out to be a big turning point in my career, as it raised my exposure one-hundred-fold. Editors of glossy magazines like Condé Nast Traveler invited me to write for them, and I’ve been freelancing for various travel venues — National Geographic Traveler, Outside, Slate, Islands, the San Francisco Chronicle, etc. — ever since. My book, Vagabonding, came out in 2003. I’ve also maintained an author website since 1998, and a blog since 2002, and both have been good for promoting and showcasing my work.

These days, travel is still the core of my work, though I occasionally write literary criticism, interviews, and other types of writing. I’d say travel writing is 80% of what I do.

Any warnings for aspiring travel writers?

Only get into travel journalism if you really love to travel and write. If you think it’s a good pretext for getting to travel, think again: you can travel just as much by saving up money from another, better-paying job, and just taking off to go vagabonding. So only pursue travel writing because you love to write as well. If that admonition hasn’t scared you off, I’ll advise you to write as much as possible, work on your narrative voice (because a vivid or funny voice can make all the difference), do some publication internships, get out there and work on your travel expertise, and — most of all — have fun!

Even if your travels don’t lead to a full-time career, they are a reward in and of themselves.

—-

You can see Rolf Potts at one of 20 cities nationwide as he celebrates the release of Marco Polo Didn’t Go There through mid-November.

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Odds and Ends:

-Check out Weebly.com for simple website creation. I create the following homepage mock-up in 10 minutes: Timothy Ferriss homepage mock-up.

-Good article on digital connection vs. recluse-like behavior (me):
Timothy Ferriss vs. Gary Vaynerchuck

-Haven’t tried Twitter yet? See how I use it — against being called a heretic — here: Timothy Ferriss on Twitter.

Envision the 5 books that have most impacted your life. How would your life be different if you’d never read them?

How would your options be affected if you could never again read a book, menu, or sign?

Here is the huge competition I’ve been promising. It’s the biggest I’ve ever done, and there are some incredible world-famous people involved. You won’t be disappointed:

If you’d like to support this idea, please take a second to vote for it here. Be sure to see the “prizes” section — how could you get into the 10K Club if you had to?

Here is his experience, in his own words, of going from shocked awareness to blissful mobility…

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People often fail to include the amount of time, wear and tear on the car, and loss of sanity into the allure of a high paying job, and how that high paying job once calculated hourly might not be better off than a fast-food worker.

My Example (back in 2000):

* 100K startup job in Sunnyvale, frequent meetings and late nights.
* Lived in Pacifica because Sunnyvale was boring.
* Girlfriend in Oakland: the only place she could afford a house.

Which, if your familiar with Bay Area traffic, forms a bermuda triangle of life suckage. What would be 20 minutes on a good day could turn into 4 hours of red lights. The draining aspect is its unpredictability, which you can never tell, and which also makes planning on getting to work on time difficult (should I get up at 4am or 6 am?).

Measuring the Pain

I got out my trusty stopwatch and averaged times over a few weeks. I was spending 20hrs in commute (commuting is an awful part-time job!) and 45-65 hrs at work, sometimes 6 days a week. Which when averaged into the “high” income calculated hourly rate between UPS delivery boy and McDonald’s chef, and I’m sure the UPS guy was in better shape. Needless to say, I was quite astounded finishing the calculation.

On Fridays, I would go visit my girlfriend and get so frazzled from the commute that, when faced with another commute into the city to go out, coupled with 20-45 minutes finding parking (sometimes coupled with stresses of showtimes), any enjoyment to be had was quickly offset by the road rage and unknowns. This frequently took its toll on the relationship in the form of arguments.

Getting to a Zero Commute

Ever since then, I’ve never lived more than 30 minutes away from work, either structuring where I live, or where/how I work. Here are the steps I followed.

1. Negotiated (both work and girlfriend) for flex time, avoiding traffic. Savings of 5-7 hours a week.
2. Second was switching to 4 day in office, 1 day telecommuting, showing productivity enhancements.
3. 3rd was going to 3 day 10 hour days (keeping an eye out for how to go independent), networking and building credibility: started presenting at user meetings, conferences, tech edited books.
4. Having enough in savings, and enough contacts, that I could go solo without stress.

Interestingly, since going solo, my hourly rate in the last year has gone from 1.5 to 4 times what I was making working for others. The projects (I develop in flash) are smoother, as there are fewer people in the pipeline and less that can go wrong. My commute can be zero if I choose, yet I can travel more. Right now, my girlfriend and I are planning a full month trip to Chicago and Hawaii.

This is not to say that one has to work out of one’s home. Increasingly, I’m entirely laptop-based, so I can work while visiting/travelling a higher percentage of the time, etc. While cafes are obvious, there are lots of other avenues. Some highlights of my work:

* in a quiet sunny grassy/tree park that connects to the cities free wireless,
* a free concert at the city of Pasadena that I wouldn’t have paid that much attention to just watching.
* at the Getty museum on the lawn.

It’s easy to make a goal of eating at one new place and seeing one new street. I was amazed at how little I knew the area around me. I might spend now 45 minutes a day commuting, but this is zero-stress walking and sightseeing and, at least in a decent city, it’s amazing how much is accessible via foot and bus distance.

The killer commute and addiction to cars is really sad… The hidden causalities in relationships, jobs, due to the stress has never been measured, but I’m sure it’s high. It’s hard to be present for the nice dinner/evening in front of you when your already stressed out about the morning commute and the important meeting.

Zero Commute with 500% More Travel

The amount I save not paying interest or insurance can be used for other things. That said I love flying when I travel, and $600 is easily 2 flights a month (perhaps more if your using the Platinum AMEX card). Renting car and a hostel can be $50/day in the US.

A few years ago, a good friend and I wanted to drive from Vegas to Marin, up the beautiful California coastal highway for a friends wedding, so we rented a convertable Mustang for a 7 days and came back through Yosemite. It was a blast! Cost $240 + $140 in gas, split 2 ways. All the experiences, none of the maintenance or interest. The car we rented had a dragging brake caliper, which I’m sure cost at least half of what we spent that week to fix. He eventually put down a payment on a house, and I went solo.

—

What unidentified time sucks have you suffered from, and how did you — or could you — eliminate them?

[This post edited from Troy Gardner's new blog]

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