WednesdayMorning

“Working” From Home, let me explain that to begin with. I’m a student, I don’t actually have a job however I’ve just started my Third Year at university. I am about 1 month into it and I’ve noticed the transition from being taught to learning on my own. My lectures tend to feel slow and pretty simple, this is probably because I picked modules I’m interested in and thus have some understanding of the subject already. The most important part of this year is the third year project, something which you will hear about in posts to come. This takes up 1/3 of my work per semester. I spend “12 hours” a week doing it (not yet but I have a feeling after the research is done I will be making it up when I have to document). This means I’m spending a lot more time working from home this year. I am in fact only really in university for 2 days a week. That leaves 5 days of home study!!!!

So I want to pass on some advice to those in the same situation or are facing it in the future, I think this subject is widely opinion based. I don’t know any facts, I just know what works for me. So lets set the scene, your a dashingly handsome computer science student studying 4 modules a semester. You also have a rather large individual project to do this year.

Rule One

Rule One: Know your working habits. I get easily distracted when I’m doing something that I find boring. Example, I am doing this instead of writing a Management Essay (well this is a break from it)don’t. I have lectures and then a meeting on Mondays, I know through experience that anything I assign myself to do when I get back probably won’t be done at 100% because I’m tired. So If I assign something, I do something that I know is either right or wrong. This tends to be coding practice, there is no ifs or maybes when it comes to writing a program. It either works how you want it to or it doesn’t.

Schedules

I’ve already mentioned it but I think it is important to schedule things in advance. I drew out a table on OpenOffice with hour blocks and just printed them out. It’s stuck on my wall, it is so easy to lose an hour just deciding what to do.  You will end up regretting that as coursework deadlines come up. I schedule my day from 9:00am – 22:00pm, now this sounds a little long but I do take time off during the day and try my hardest to get my work done during weekdays. Looking at this week, I’m taking 3 hours off a day for lunch and dinner and then stopping at 10pm to spend some time with my girlfriend before we go to sleep.

You may be thinking “wow, how does he keep to that everyday” by now. Simple answer is I really don’t, this is why I tend to over schedule a task. Add an hour to it, if anything it just means you get your stuff for the day done before you expected and you get longer in the evening to enjoy yourself. A word of warning: don’t go over the top with over scheduling because you do still need to complete your goals for the week.

Creating the Schedule

How do you know what you need to do? I tend to use to-do lists for this, whenever I get a coursework deadline I put it on the to-do list and simply order it by hand in date. When it comes to writing my schedule for the next week I can simply look at what I have done that week and pick off the top few “to-do’s”. I would suggest using toodledo.com, It has a great iPhone application that doesn’t require you to have a premium account with them.

What to do on those days “when you can’t be bothered”

Well if I had a good answer to this one I would be a much more productive man. On days like this the battle is already over really, your the only one that can make you work.  You may want to retouch the schedule to space out the work for that day.  Remember that means you will need to make it up later. You may want to try changing subject or working on something else to get yourself to concentrate. I just try to force myself to do as much as I can, I usually find I get very little done but it is better than nothing.

Now to the interesting part, making use of Technology!

Doing stuff on the move

Yes, I’m talking about my iPhone.  It makes email, social networking and general life easier. I am so much more organise since I got this thing. I spend around 45 minutes traveling to university on the days I go in and about an hour on the way home. I usually take this time to do things like emails and catch up on facebook/twitter. This is an extra 30 minutes I gain when I get home, these small things really do mount up.

Dual Screens

Currently, I’m running a dual screen setup along with my netbook as a terminal pc (just a single terminal on the screen, usually sshed into my main machine). This additional workspace makes you more productive, this is a simple fact. I even make use of the additional desktops provided to me by openbox. What I would really like is to be able to have separate desktops on each screen but no Window Managers or even operating systems seem to make use of dual screens properly.

I tend to have my left hand screen as my main screen, I usually have the document I’m editing or the code I’m focused on displayed on this one and use the other screen for reference material. It does take a little while to get productive in a Dual Screen system but you will really miss them when you work on another machine.

Working Environment

Now there are several things you need to consider when creating your Working Environment:-

• File Organisation
• File Distribution
• Software

File Organisation

Okay, now everyone says this but actually doing it is really important. It’s more about finding something in a year or two’s time. You need to keep it consistent, if your at home most of the time but are using a machine in University to work on now and then you’ll want to be able to know where something will be regardless of the machine.

File Distribution

I’ll be honest, emailing yourself a file doesn’t really cut it. Check out Dropbox or Ubuntu One, I personally use Dropbox because at university I can’t always use a Linux Machine and even the Linux machines don’t run Ubuntu. You could consider other types of cloud storage too but Dropbox is also intelligent enough to detect symbolic links so it doesn’t need to disrupt your Filing System.

Software

When running windows software was painful, you have to download them all and then install them separately. With Linux you can just go ahead and sudo apt-get install list of awesome open source software. You can even copy across your dot files with Dropbox using symbolic links.

Finally

Your working environment is something very personal, I would be interested to hear about what you guys do. Please leave a comment about it.

Thanks,

Darius