Inbound Thinking

This is the second post in a series about pain-reducing improvements I’ve made to my workstation. For more detail on the genesis of the problem, read part 1.

Some of the earliest pain I experienced while working was in my right hand. It didn’t take long for me to realize that  it was being overworked. Constant jumping between the mouse and keyboard and using the cramped laptop keyboard and track pad were causing a lot of trouble.

For years, I had used a trackball on my home computer; it was fast and pain-free. So I bought another Logitech TrackMan to replace my mouse at work. It worked great for a few weeks, but then I started to notice pain in my thumb. The constant thumb movement with this particular trackball became painful over the course of an eight or ten hour day. It also did not solve the problem of moving between the mouse and keyboard frequently. My right hand is dominant, so I was using it for most keyboard commands in addition to mousing.

I decided that since my right hand was being overworked, I would switch mousing duties to my left hand. I switched back to a normal mouse, since the trackball was right hand-only and  made a cold turkey switch to mousing left-handed. It was pretty awkward at first. I did not reverse the buttons, so I had to either hold the mouse diagonally, or use my middle finger for primary click and index finger for secondary. It made me hold my hand on top of the mouse instead of palming it, so I didn’t rest my arm weight on the mouse and that was good for my wrist.

Moving the mouse from right to left also gave my workstation a more convenient layout. Keyboard was center with attached number pad on the right and the mouse on the left. So the left-side mouse was closer to the main keyboard than my right-hand was. And there was less pain because I did not need to hold my arm out; I could just let it hang naturally at my side and would still able to reach the mouse.

It probably took two months to get used mousing left-handed. Most tasks were manageable early, but touchy things, like working in Photoshop, took a while to get right. Today I can be as pixel perfect with my left hand as I am with my right. Although switching to the left-handed mouse did not totally relieve all pain, it did help with my right hand and arm so I have not switched back.

In the next post of this series I plan on detailing some of the equipment changes I’ve made at my workstation.