This article, by Justin Baiocchi, was originally published in The Northern Daily Leader on 13 August 2016.

In our office we all have standing desks. They’re a special type of desk which allows you to raise the height of your keyboard and monitor such that you can be standing while working. The principle is well-established: prolonged sitting is bad for you and you can add years to your life by getting up on your feet. A scary article recently claimed that more than four hours per day of screen time, a figure that the average office worker would easily eclipse, increases your risk of death by any cause by 50%! Inspired (or rather, unnerved) by this, the decision was made to buy everyone in the office one of the fancy desks. It’s all about squeezing in a little bit more motion and activity into the day. Rather than sit down for 8 hours, spend some of that time standing and in doing so burn a few extra calories and hopefully prolong your life. If you have to be at work for eight hours a day, you may as well use the time to reduce your chances of dying.

While it is commonly accepted that being active and moving around is good for your health, the same doesn’t necessarily apply to your investments. Many people operate under the misconception that your assets have to be ‘worked’. That is, you’ve got to be getting in there, buying and selling, chopping and changing and generally messing around with your investments as much as possible. If you own shares, you’ve got to be trading as much as possible; if you have managed funds or superannuation you have to try to chase the best fund managers and keep selling the others. The truth is, all this activity is more than likely hurting your wealth, not helping to grow it. Take shares for instance. A share is exactly what its name suggests – a share in a business. Yes, you might only own a really small share of that business, but you are still a part-owner. It’s the ownership aspect of shares that people often forget. The objective is to take a stake in a business (however small that stake is) and see the value of your investment grow over time as the business grows. The fact that someone is willing to buy your shares off you for 3% more than you paid for them only one day ago has no bearing on the performance of the company. To paraphrase the world’s most successful investor, Warren Buffett, every investment you make should be with the intent to hold it forever, though of course circumstances can change over time. So next time you are thinking of meddling with your investments, don’t just do something, sit there!