There comes a point every New Zealand winter where I realise I’ve somehow become shaped like a prawn. Maybe the last few days’ sub-zero runs at 5am have something to do with it.

Either way, it’s not an overnight transformation. It happens gradually, somewhere between the first genuinely cold morning and the discovery that the sun has once again decided the working day should end in darkness. One day I’m sitting or standing reasonably upright. A few weeks later I’m peering over my laptop with my shoulders somewhere around my ears, wondering why my neck feels like I’ve spent the weekend moving house.

I suspect I’m not alone.

For most people, winter changes the way they work in ways that are easy to overlook. Walking a little less. Lingering over coffee a little longer. Eating lunch at the desk because heading outside suddenly feels like an unnecessary act of heroism. Before long, the spare bedroom or dining table that passed for a home office in summer somehow feels rather more permanent than anyone originally intended.

I’ve become reasonably disciplined over the years. I get out for a run most days, partly because I enjoy it and partly because I know exactly what happens if I don’t. Left to my own devices, I’d happily spend ten hours sitting in front of a screen before wondering why I feel like someone twenty years older than I actually am. Even with that discipline, winter has a habit of winning.

The thought struck me this week after reading an announcement from technology vendor Logitech about a new ergonomic keyboard and mouse. The products themselves aren’t really the point. They simply reminded me how much attention we pay to the software that powers our work and how little thought we often give to the physical experience of actually doing that work.

We obsess over processors, battery life, AI features and collaboration platforms. Entire industries exist to help us shave seconds off workflows or automate repetitive tasks. Meanwhile, many of us are still using the same chair we inherited from another room in the house, balancing a laptop on whatever surface happens to be available, and gripping a mouse that probably should have been retired sometime during the last government.

We’re remarkably good at adapting to small discomforts. A slightly sore wrist becomes normal. Tight shoulders become “just one of those things”. We stretch absent-mindedly between Zoom meetings without really considering why we need to.

The interesting thing about discomfort is that it’s cumulative. Very few people wake up one morning unable to work because their desk setup is poor. Instead, it’s hundreds of tiny compromises repeated every day. The monitor that’s a little too low. The chair that’s never quite adjusted properly. The habit of leaning forward to read the screen despite owning perfectly good reading glasses that remain, for reasons one can’t adequately explain, somewhere else in the house.

I have developed an impressive ability to spend several minutes looking for those glasses while they are, more often than I’d care to admit, sitting on top of my head. Age is a wonderful teacher of humility.

Logitech also cited research suggesting that more than half of office workers experience discomfort by the end of the working day. As with all vendor-sponsored research, it’s worth treating the numbers with a healthy degree of scepticism. But the conclusion itself feels entirely plausible. Most of us aren’t in agony. We’re just a bit uncomfortable.

The problem is that persistent, low-level discomfort is remarkably good at stealing energy without announcing itself. We blame feeling flat on poor sleep, a busy week or too many meetings, when sometimes it’s simply that we’ve spent eight hours hunched over a screen in much the same position.

Technology conversations tend to gravitate towards the spectacular. Artificial intelligence. Quantum computing. The next breakthrough that’s going to transform everything. The reality of work is generally rather less glamorous. It’s answering emails, writing reports, joining video calls, updating spreadsheets and reading documents. Hours of quiet, repetitive interaction with a keyboard and mouse.

Those humble tools probably have more influence over how our bodies feel at the end of the day than the latest AI feature ever will.

None of this is an argument for spending thousands of dollars redesigning your home office. Social media would have us believe peak productivity requires a standing desk, a treadmill, three perfectly aligned monitors and enough ambient lighting to land aircraft. For most of us, that’s fantasy.

The improvements that actually matter are usually far more mundane. Raise the screen a few centimetres. Use an external keyboard instead of hunching over a laptop. Replace the mouse that’s become polished smooth after years of faithful service. Stand up occasionally, not because your smartwatch nags you to, but because your spine has quietly been trying to get your attention for the past hour.

None of those changes is exciting. Nobody has ever gone viral on LinkedIn for correctly adjusting the height of their office chair. But they do add up.

Hybrid work is no longer an experiment. For many people, it’s simply the way work gets done. That means our makeshift workspaces have quietly become permanent ones, even if we still think of them as temporary.

Perhaps this winter is a useful reminder that technology isn’t just about the software we use or the devices we buy. It’s also about the relationship between those tools and the humans using them. We spend enormous amounts of time thinking about digital transformation, productivity gains and the future of work. Sometimes the most immediate improvement comes not from adopting something new, but from paying attention to something we’ve been ignoring for years.

As for me, I’m going to pay a little more attention to the way I work over the next few months. My standing desk certainly helps, but it’s no silver bullet. Like most things, it’s the accumulation of small habits that matters. And if I can make it through to spring without resembling a question mark quite so often, I’ll consider that a reasonable result.