Chapter 18: How to Make Yourself Comfortable
Having the right tools on your computer will help you be more productive.
Having a comfortable environment will help as well.
- Peace and quiet.
- Study after study has shown that this has more impact on productivity than a
fast network, a fat disk, or caffeine, but most workplaces are still too
crowded, too noisy, and filled with too many interruptions
[WeziakBialowolska2018]. Some people still say, "If I can't
overhear what other people are talking about, I might miss something
important," but that only applies if the only people you're overhearing are
members of your own team (and even then, it's a dubious claim).
- A comfortable chair.
- A good chair with a firm back costs half what a mid-range laptop does. A
full-sized keyboard (I have large hands—most laptop keyboards force me to
bend my wrists uncomfortably) costs fifty dollars, and a lamp with a soft
light bulb is another forty. The combination doesn't just let me program
longer each day; it also helps ensure that I'll still be able to program
five or ten years from now without chronic back and wrist pain. If you have
good arches, you may prefer a standing desk; if you have space, sitting on
an exercise ball has been good for my abs and lets me bounce up and down
during boring meetings.
- A good microphone.
- You can have a very productive meeting with video turned off, but if you
don't have decent audio you're sunk. It's therefore worth investing in a
decent microphone. Mine cost me forty dollars; I
spent another twelve dollars to get a gooseneck stand to keep it ten
centimeters away from both my keyboard and my mouth.
- A pad of gridded paper and several ballpoint pens.
- I often make notes for myself when programming, or draw box-and-arrow
diagrams of my data structures when debugging. I used to keep an editor open
in a background window to do the former, but when my wrists started acting
up, I discovered that taking my hands away from the keyboard for a few
moments to scribble something down provided welcome relief. I also quickly
discovered that the odds of me being able to read my own notes the next day
rose dramatically if I used gridded paper to line them up. Younger
programmers (which from my point of view is most programmers these days)
may prefer to use an online note-taking app or something on their phone.
- A heavy mug for coffee or tea.
- I don't know why, but a styrofoam cup, or a normal teacup, just isn't as
satisfying as a little hand-sized ceramic boulder. Maybe it satisfies my
subconscious atavistic urge to whack my computer when it misbehaves…
- A toothbrush.
- You'll feel better, you'll get sick less often, and your colleagues might
stop suggesting that the team switch stick with virtual meetings even after
lockdown ends.
- A squirt bottle of glass cleaner and a box of kleenex.
- I can't stand smears on my screen. They drive me nuts. Whenever I'm showing
something to someone, and they actually touch my screen instead of just
pointing, I find myself reaching for that heavy mug… Then I take a breath
and clean my screen.
- A rubber duck.
- One of the creators of Unix kept a rubber duck next to his computer. If a bug took more
than a few minutes to track down, he put the duck on his desk and explained
the problem to it, because speaking out loud forces you to marshal your
thoughts, which in turn highlights any contradictions or missed steps that
you hadn't noticed while everything was just swirling around inside your
head.
- A chess set, a deck of cards, or some knitting.
- I'm a very bad chess player. Luckily, so are most people, so it's usually
possible to find someone at my level for a quick game at lunch. Other
programmers I know play euchre, or knit—a programmers' stitch and bitch
session can be jaw-dropping to listen to. Everyone needs to take breaks to
re-set their brain; it's better to acknowledge this and do something social
in the middle of the day than to say, "Must… keep… coding…" and produce
garbage that just has to be rewritten later.
- Pictures.
- Everyone wants to feel at home; everyone wants to make wherever they are
uniquely theirs. I hang a few postcards on the wall wherever I work, along
with a photograph of my wife and daughter taken a few months after she was
born (my daughter, that is), just to remind me what's really important.