Do posture reminders work? What helps and what gets ignored

Posture reminders can help, but probably not in the way most people expect. A reminder will not train you to sit bolt upright all day, and you should not want it to. What it can do is break up long spells of sitting still, get you to shift or stand, and slowly teach you to notice your own slump. For most desk workers, that is the part that matters.

Whether a reminder works for you comes down to something simpler: whether you are still answering it after the first week. This is where many posture reminders fail, for reasons that have little to do with posture. This post covers what reminders can and cannot do, why people stop listening, and what makes one worth keeping.

The best posture is the next posture

There is a line often repeated by physiotherapists and ergonomists: the best posture is the next posture. It means that no single position is right for hours at a time, and that changing position often matters more than finding the perfect one.

This is a shift from the older advice to sit bolt upright and never slouch. Research has had a hard time showing that any one sitting posture prevents back or neck pain, and many people sit in ways a textbook would frown at without any trouble. What does seem to matter is time. A position that feels fine for twenty minutes can feel stiff and sore after two hours, because the same muscles have been holding the same load the whole time. That is true even of a "good" posture held rigidly.

So the goal is not a pose. It is a comfortable, supported position to come back to, and plenty of movement away from it: lean back, sit forward, cross your legs for a while and uncross them, stand up, walk to the window. A few minutes of slouching is not damage. Hours without moving are what tend to leave people stiff.

What a reminder can actually do

A good posture reminder does three useful things.

• It breaks up stillness. The most valuable thing a reminder does is interrupt an hour in which you have not moved. Even if all you do is sit back, roll your shoulders and settle again, you have changed position.
• It builds awareness. Slumping happens without you noticing, usually when you are absorbed. Each reminder is a small moment of noticing, and many people find that after a few weeks they start catching the slump themselves, before anything prompts them.
• It shows up problems with the setup. If every reminder finds you leaning toward a screen that is too low, the reminder has told you something useful about the desk. No amount of sitting up fixes a laptop that sits too low.

Here is what it cannot do. It cannot fix a desk that forces you into a hunch, and it cannot treat pain. Pain that lasts, or numbness or tingling in an arm or a leg, is a job for a physiotherapist or a doctor, not for a notification.

The research on reminders like these is modest, both in size and quality. It suggests they can nudge behavior in the short term, mostly while people are still paying attention to them. That is the honest case for posture reminders: they work while you keep answering them.

Why people ignore posture reminders

Posture reminders are easy to start and easy to abandon, and the reasons people give up on them are remarkably consistent.

• They come too often. A reminder every fifteen minutes becomes wallpaper. After a day or two you dismiss it without reading it, which can be worse than no reminder, because it trains you to ignore the prompt.
• They come at the wrong time. In the middle of a call, halfway through a sentence, while you are presenting your screen. A reminder that interrupts at a bad moment gets dismissed, and soon gets turned off.
• They are vague. "Check your posture" leaves you to work out what that means. A specific action, like "sit back in the chair" or "drop your shoulders", is easier to do in the few seconds you have.
• They nag. A tone that makes you feel scolded makes you want to swipe it away. Guilt is a poor motivator for something you need to do a dozen times a day.
• They give you two choices: obey or dismiss. When you are busy, you will dismiss. A reminder you can put off for a few minutes still has a chance of being answered later.
• They say the same thing every time. The tenth identical message is invisible.
• They ask for the impossible. "Sit up straight" implies holding it. You can't, nobody can, and every slump afterwards feels like failure.

What makes a reminder worth answering

Turn that list around and you have a decent description of a reminder people keep.

1. Few enough that each one counts. A handful of well-timed prompts a day beats one every quarter hour.
2. Only when you are actually there and available. Counting time at the keyboard, not time on the clock, and staying out of calls.
3. One small, specific action. Something you can do in a few seconds without stopping your work.
4. A real "later". A way to say "not now" that brings the reminder back once, instead of losing it.
5. Variety. Different words, different requests: shoulders one time, feet the next, screen distance in the afternoon.
6. A tone that is on your side. Kind or funny works better than stern, which is a whole topic of its own: why kind reminders work better than nagging.
7. Movement over position. Ask for a change, not a pose.

How to answer one in fifteen seconds

When a posture reminder comes, resist the urge to snap into a rigid, soldier-like pose that you will hold for thirty seconds and then abandon. Do a quick reset instead.

1. Sit all the way back in the chair, so it supports your lower back.
2. Put your feet flat on the floor or on a footrest.
3. Breathe out and let your shoulders drop.
4. Glance at the screen. If you are looking down at it or leaning in to read, it is too low or too far, and that is worth fixing when you next have a minute.
5. If you have not stood up for about an hour, stand up now, even for a moment.

Then forget about it and get back to work. You will drift again within a few minutes, and that is fine. The next reminder, or the next natural pause, will catch it. For the shoulders in particular, see why your shoulders creep up at the desk.

How Notchpals does posture reminders

Notchpals was written with most of that list in mind. Your crew has one Posture character, such as Sir Pounce or Barnaby, and it asks for one specific thing at a time: back against the chair, feet flat, shoulders down, and once a day between 2 and 7 PM, a look at how far you sit from the screen.

Sir PounceBack against the chair, if you please. It's a throne, not a hammock.

Here is how it lines up with the list above.

• Few enough. Posture checks and Shoulders down are repeating reminders that run from 9 AM to 9 PM, and every repeating reminder in your crew comes out of one allowance for the day: 4 on Calm, 8 on Normal, 12 on Chatty. Posture gets a share of that, not a slot every hour.
• Only when you are there. It counts time at the keyboard and mouse, not time on the clock, and after two minutes without either it treats you as away. It also holds back whenever the microphone or camera is in use, which covers most calls. It does not detect screen sharing as such, but a slideshow running full screen on the notch's display keeps it quiet too.
• A real later. Later brings the request back once, 20 minutes on. A second Later drops it, and ignoring it counts as Later.
• Variety. A character won't repeat a line within 3 days, so the tenth reminder doesn't read like the first.

Sir PounceVery well. I shall sulk on my cushion until you come crawling back.

Two honest limits. Notchpals does not watch you. It never looks through the camera, so it has no idea whether you are slouching, and it trusts your Done. And posture reminders cover only half of "the next posture". The other half is getting out of the chair, which is what a Movement character's Stand up moment is for, once you have been at the Mac for 55 minutes without a break. For ideas on what to do once you are up, see movement snacks for desk workers.