Just standing around

I'm fascinated by the idea of standing desks, but they are very expensive. Articles pop up fairly frequently advocating standing for longer during the day, rather than just sitting (Lifehacker is a particular fan of this mode of working). And even though work bought me an amazing chair, my posture is usually terrible and I am so aware of how much I sit during the day, just because...well, I work at a computer.

I liked the look of the Varidesk as a non-permanent, adjustable solution but it's $300+, and that's a lot of money to spend on something when you don't know if it'll suit your way of working.

I'm the only one in the office today so I've decided while nobody else is here and I don't have to explain what I'm doing, I'd set up the simplest version of a standing desk and try it out for the day. We have a set of Ikea nesting tables out in the common area and the smallest one is the perfect height for my monitor. The other good thing I thought is that because I have a laptop/monitor set up rather than a desktop computer, when I want to sit down I can just flip up the laptop screen and work off that.

Our floors are carpeted and are very comfortable in bare feet. I've only been standing here for 11 minutes so far so maybe I won't be feeling so excited about it after a few hours. But we'll see.

The only dodgy thing so far is working out the keyboard/mouse arrangement. I've got the keyboard stacked up on a couple of file boxes so it's at the right height, but it looks a bit silly. But if it works for me today, then I might investigate a more elegant solution.

Hurrah for experiments! Have you worked at a standing desk? Any tips? Did you love it or hate it?