OE Group

10/09/2026

And did those feet…

Walk upon England’s mountains green?

Well, perhaps not today.

There’s an assignment to finish. A Teams call at three. Six messages you haven’t answered. Something called “a quick task” that has already taken 47 minutes.

Outside, however, Britain continues being inconveniently beautiful.

There are hills to climb. Parks to lie in. Dogs that require walking. Friends already at the pub. Trains leaving for places where your laptop isn’t invited.

The poet William Blake imagined England's green and pleasant land over 200 years ago, and vowed not to cease from Mental Fight until he'd built it. We may have swapped his dark satanic mills for screens, notifications and the little red circle telling us we have 1,437 unread emails, but the fight itself — the daily one, not the historic one — remains remarkably familiar. Your time belongs to more than work.

Hour Buddy helps put boundaries around the things that need doing. Set 5, 10, 25 or 50 minutes. Give the task your attention. See the time you’ve allocated to it. And when that time is done, decide what gets your attention next.

By all means, be productive. Just remember the green and pleasant land is still out there (well perhaps not so green after the summer we’ve had). Go and put your feet on it.

Meet Hour Buddy: https://www.online-ergonomics.co.uk/product/hour-buddy/

08/09/2026

You've got an essay to write. So why are you reorganising your desk?

Or rereading the same paragraph. Checking your phone. Making another coffee. Thinking about everything you need to do instead of actually starting any of it.

And when you finally do start, an hour somehow disappears.

Studying isn't always hard because the work is hard. Sometimes it's getting started. Judging how long something will actually take. Staying focused. Looking at three hours of revision and not knowing where to even begin.

So make the time smaller.

- 5 minutes to get started.
- 10 minutes to review your notes.
- 25 minutes of focused revision.
- 50 minutes to properly crack on with that assignment.

Hour Buddy turns an open-ended "I have to study" into a defined block with a beginning and an end.

That structure can be especially useful for students with ADHD, time blindness, executive function challenges or overwhelm. But you don't need a diagnosis to know the peculiar art of spending 45 minutes avoiding a 20-minute task.

Study time, made visible.

Meet Hour Buddy. Time you can see. Focus you can feel.

Discover more: https://www.online-ergonomics.co.uk/product/hour-buddy/

Meet Hour Buddy, the flip-to-start timer that makes time management effortless. No fiddly buttons, no confusing menus, just flip the cube and go. Time can be tricky to judge, particularly for people who experience time blindness or difficulties with focus, executive function and transitions. Hour Bu...

07/09/2026

Not everyone experiences time in the same way.

For many of us, a clock on the wall or a timer on our phone is enough. We know roughly how long ten minutes feels. We can judge whether a task will take half an hour. We notice time passing.

But for people who experience time blindness, executive function challenges, cognitive fatigue, anxiety or overwhelm, time can be much harder to judge, structure and manage. Starting a task can be difficult. Twenty minutes can disappear unnoticed. Moving from one activity to another can become a challenge.

That's where something as simple as a timer can become something more useful.

Hour Buddy takes time out of the background and puts it physically in front of you. Choose a block of time, flip to start and the visual countdown provides a clear, predictable reference for the task ahead.

It won't manage your time for you. But for people who benefit from greater visual structure, predictability and external cues, it can make time easier to work with.
And that includes people with ADHD and attention-related conditions, autism and sensory processing differences, executive function challenges, cognitive fatigue and brain fog, as well as students, children and workplace professionals.

Meet Hour Buddy. Time you can see. Focus you can feel.
Discover more: https://www.online-ergonomics.co.uk/product/hour-buddy/

03/09/2026

The First Conversation Is the Hardest Part

It’s hard to see the wood for the trees when you’re the one being chopped down.

When you’re struggling at work, back pain, sleepless nights, poor concentration and exhaustion can each feel like a separate problem. Seeing the connections between them, and knowing where to start, is much harder.

That’s why the third and final article in our Mental Health Awareness series turns to the employee: what support can you ask for, who do you speak to and what happens next?

For The First Conversation, we spoke to Nancy Monk, an occupational health specialist with seventeen years and over 6,000 workplace assessments behind her. Her experience makes one thing clear: the split between physical and mental health rarely survives contact with an actual workplace.

Nancy told us about an employee referred for worsening lower back pain. During his assessment, it emerged that he wasn’t sleeping, his concentration had gone, he was caring for a parent with early-stage dementia and, following a restructure, covering a colleague’s workload.

The recommendations addressed the whole picture, from better ergonomic support to changes in his working day. Three months later, his pain had eased, he was sleeping better and his concentration had improved.

That’s where a Workplace Needs Assessment can help. It looks beyond a single condition to understand what is preventing someone from functioning well at work and what could remove those barriers.

Read the full article: The First Conversation: How to Get Support at Work https://www.online-ergonomics.co.uk/knowledge/the-first-conversation/

Need Support at work: Get a Workplace Needs Assessment https://www.online-ergonomics.co.uk/assessments/workplace%20needs-assessment-wpna/

31/08/2026

Your laptop keyboard is not the problem. Your screen is. And it is sitting about 20 centimetres too low.

Mark Rigby explains why the laptop screen, not the keyboard, is the root cause of neck and back strain during sustained laptop use, and how raising it to eye level solves the problem. The Aluminium Laptop Riser offers two height settings in a foldable, portable 500g design. Suitable for screens 11 to 17 inches.

27/08/2026

5,000 years of civilisation. Countless inventions. But we’re still gripping a stick to write with.

Surely we can do better?

Meet PenAgain. The pen, reinvented for anyone who finds gripping a conventional pen uncomfortable or difficult.

Less grip. Less strain. More comfortable writing.