Comics letterer Jim Campbell recently posted a cautionary tale to Twitter. In short, years spent in terrible office chairs has left him with major back problems that now require a posture-correcting harness and a daily session on an inversion table that involves “5–10 minutes hanging upside down by my ankles trying to straighten out my spine”.

That might sound extreme and horrifying, but I get the impression the shift to work-from-home is going to cause many people similar issues. One friend remarked his back was knackered after only a week of working from home, and then it turned out he’d been working at his dining room table. Dining chairs aren’t really designed for long sessions, to say the least.

I’ve been WFH since the very early 2000s, and have also suffered since the late 1990s with some form of RSI that forced me long ago to reassess my use of pointing devices. Over the years, I’ve talked to a bunch of experts in workplace design and ergonomics and compiled useful rules for an ergonomic set-up.

Here they are in handy cut-out-and-keep form:

• Carve out a set space you can work from, which can be set up to your specific needs
• Invest in a really good chair, or demand your company does—you will be sitting in the thing for hours every single day
• Your eyeline should meet the top third of your computer’s display, so raise it accordingly
• Do not use laptop stands that claim to do the above by angling the keyboard. They never raise the screen enough, and they leave they keyboard in a very unergonomic position
• Also avoid laptop form-factors for long-term use—if you don’t have a desktop, connect your laptop to an external display set at the correct height, an external keyboard, and an external mouse/trackpad
• ^ See also: iPads
• When seated, sit with your back straight and feet mostly flat on the floor
• Forearms should effectively be parallel with the tabletop, and your elbows roughly at 90 degrees, ideally lightly resting on chair arms
• Your keyboard’s position is important. Have the Space bar directly in front of you
• If you use an extended keyboard, do not have its entire footprint central before you—it should be offset, so that the Space bar is directly in front of you. This might require you move your pointing device to your left hand to avoid over-stretching
• Using a laptop with a built-in number pad that shifts the entire keyboard to the left, making you twist to type? Hurl it into the sea (or use an external keyboard for all but the shortest sessions)
• Avoid gripping a mouse for lengthy periods. Where possible, switch to a trackpad or alternate pointing device that causes less strain on your arm
• Fidget regularly—roll your shoulders/stretch your neck and arms/move your ankles
• Use a timer system to enforce short breaks. If you wear an Apple Watch, pay attention to and submit to stand nags. Bear Focus Timer is a good option too (and offers iPhone/Android support)
• Carve out time for physical exercise, be that yoga, an outdoors walk, or using exercise machines
• Standing desks can be good, but come with their own set of problems. Do not overdo it, and ensure that if you use one you have appropriate footwear, or your feet will be at risk. (I overindulged when I got mine, leading to temporary heel/tendon problems.)

One final tip: listen to your body. If your arm or back becomes stiff, stop working and reassess your workplace. It might just be you’re working too long. Or perhaps you’ve picked up a bad habit. My worst is holding a Wacom stylus while I type, which results in my right forearm/fingers becoming stiff. I recently bought a pen holder, which has helped through giving me a visual reminder about the stylus’s location. When things get very bad, the Wacom is temporarily removed entirely, until my arm improves.

But poor habits can arrive from anywhere. You can buy an expensive Aeron chair but set it up badly (if a supplier offers to set a chair up for you, let them), or sit on one with your legs crossed beneath you. Or you can end up lying on the sofa, typing away on a laptop, “just for a while” until you realise you’ve been doing that for days. Or you can have a reasonable daytime set-up but knacker your arms by phone overuse in the evenings.

The key with ergonomics and better WFH set-ups is to recognise that problems exist and remain vigilant about them cropping up over time. By dealing with problems early, you’ll lower the risk to your own physical wellbeing. If you’re young, you might hand-wave this away; and if you’re older and have been fortunate, you might similarly think such issues can’t or won’t ever happen to you. But it really can only take a few weeks of genuinely awful workplace set-up to have a knock-on effect that can last for years. So do the best you can to stop that happening to you; and if your company just sent you home with a laptop for six months, demand they do better to protect your health.