Geek Trap: Your Body and How to Abuse It
If you are a geek, you probably find that your hands are on your list of top 5 favorite body parts. And they should be! They allow you to code, solder, and… well, hands do a lot. Unfortunately those highly valued appendages aren’t indestructible, and after spending a large amount of time at a keyboard they will deteriorate. That is right: I’m talking about repetitive strain injuries, or RSIs.
I’ve gone through it: wrist pain, tingly fingers, and joint aches caused by long hours at the keyboard for work and pleasure. You can find many pages on the subject, but none of them say what I have discovered about the condition.
It sucks.
The sites on RSI all tell you not to work through the pain, but to address the pain and take steps to remedy it as soon as possible. That might work if I weren’t a young male with a mild case of a testosterone induced invincibility complex. I initially tried to just keep clacking away on the keyboard, not wanting to forfeit time at home on my individual projects, and not wanting to be unproductive at work. It was a bad idea. I reached the point where I had a constant pain in my wrist and a tingling sensation in my thumb. It probably would have gone away if I had eased off for a bit to heal.
Those well informed sites will also tell you to take breaks regularly to give your body a break. I had always thought of taking breaks as a sign of weakness (thanks RIT!), so I dutifully ignored the suggestion. What I learned when I did start to take breaks was that our academic institutions were hiding that breaks can be fun. I’ve learned that if you plan your work around your breaks, about one 10-15 minute break every 90-120 minutes depending on how well you are concentrating on a particular day, you can increase productivity. This time range blocks your time into ‘productivity pockets’ (my term, don’t steal it) that are highly recommended by concentration ninjas. So just as I start to feel the productivity decline of mental exhaustion, I go bother a co-worker or refill my coffee cup - sometimes both. My hands appreciate it, my brain re-energizes, and I hit my next productivity pocket (seriously, that phrase is my invention) I’m refreshed and ready to go.
And as far as “exercise” goes, it really does help. I tried a couple things, like holding my palms outstretched and trying to push down and then up on a horizontal surface. I looked kind of silly. I instead recommend what I feel has really made the greatest difference in healing my RSI: power putty. I’m not product placing or anything, the stuff works for a couple reasons. First, it gives you something dynamic to do with your hands. Squeezing those metal spring-resistance devices might work, but they bore me nearly to nap time. Squeezing a putty gives your hand something to do that you can’t really predict, so it doesn’t get old. Second and more importantly: it doesn’t look stupid while you do it at your desk. This greatly increases the odds that I’ll actually use it. And I guess third, it comes in a container shaped like a little fist, which could be used as a symbol of a political uprising or revolution, whichever comes first.
