It’s been a long, cold winter, and I work a few days a week from home, so I’m inside at my desk a lot right now. When a friend told me she uses a Cubii whenever she works at her desk I went online to see about it (as one does).
The Cubii is one of many (many) under-desk elliptical and cycling trainers, ranging from about $150-$450 (if you don’t count the high-end ones). They claim to be small, silent, and easy enough to be peddled for exercise while one sits doing office work. The Cubii looks simple and convenient, though if I bought one it might join all of my other doo-dads I have bought over the years for simple and convenient exercise…now gathering dust.
Pedal trainers join many (many) other devices that are sold for exercise at one’s desk: isometric standing devices, standing desk mats with ridges for stretching, disc wobble cushions, gyro balls, and smart water bottles. I remember when at one time there was only the stabilizer ball that you sat on instead of a chair. Now you can buy an entire work station that doubles as exercise machinery.
Awhile ago I read an article by Eryk Salvaggio (2024), “Challenging the Myths of Generative AI”, that has stuck with me. The piece focuses on how, based on misunderstandings about how AI works, certain myths are shaping how we justify AI’s importance and reshaping how we think about ourselves and what we do.
For example, AI is widely regarded as useful because it is understood to save time. (Frequent users know this may not be true depending on how complex the task, how good one’s prompting skills are, and how critical one is about the output). The productivity myth underlying this valuation is the automation of work. If is AI is good because it saves time, then automating more of our work with AI is good because it will save more time. In this AI-infused workflow cycle, where saving time with AI is better than working without it, the automation of work itself becomes the preferred norm.
Put another way, has anyone encouraged using AI to help complete a task more slowly because that task is worth spending time on?
I just spent a bunch of time explaining that idea (thanks for sticking with me) because the productivity myth may take a related form in the world of desk exercise equipment. This equipment is sold as a healthy remedy for the harms of sedentary office work, but it also produces a new idea that exercising while working is good. We save time because we are doing both at once, but in doing so our relationships to work and exercise change.
In “optimizing” work time also as exercise time (or using exercise time to work) then neither work nor exercise needs to be (should be?) the single focus of our time. Whether we are effective working while exercising, or exercising in safe form or duration while working, is beside the point.
Of course, no one lives in this purely either/or world: you can use your Cubii at your desk and still go curling later in the day. And, not every minute of our work day is likely to suffer if we were to divide our attention with light exercise once in awhilr. For fidgety people like myself, physical activity of some sort might indeed promote increased focus during certain tasks.
Furthermore, if you want to exercise at work, you can certainly avoid commodifying it by passing on the costly exercise equipment and opting for brief stretching or body weight exercises. Most importantly, I am certainly not refusing the vast evidence that prolonged seated work is bad for one’s health.
But…in reviewing many review pages of Cubiis (and their first and second cousins) I began reflecting on how serving the myth of productivity means we may be more more likely to buy things that will help us to squeeze more out of our time without questioning the squeezing. When it is always better to optimize by going faster or doing two things at once, we may start to care less about what we are actually doing than how long it takes us to get to the next thing.
