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Informatics Fourth Year Honours Course Guide
Keeping healthy and happy

Inevitably in 4th year you will spend substantial amounts of time sitting in front of a computer screen. This is a good time to develop healthy working habits that will stand you in good stead for a lifetime of working with computers.

Although you have access to the terminal rooms most of the day, this is to give you freedom to allocate your time as you wish rather than as an encouragement for you to work unsocial hours. Perhaps you work well at night, but if you make it a habit then you will either miss out on a lot of sleep or end up with problems as a result of not attending lectures or tutorials in the day. Good time management obviously helps you to avoid having to do "all night sessions" when a deadline comes. Making maximal use of the periods in the day between lectures and tutorials is well worth the effort if it means that you can have whole evenings and weekends off. It really is important to develop a lifestyle where work and leisure activities (including some physical exercise) are both given adequate space. But this does not come automatically—you have to plan to make it happen.

When you are involved for a long period in the terminal room, bear in mind the following points:

• Think about your posture when you are working at the machine. Most chairs are adjustable to some extent, and a small amount of time spent getting into a comfortable position pays off. Make sure that you know how to get as close as possible to the ideal posture. The posters displayed in the terminal rooms give useful advice on this.
• No matter how well designed, chairs are not designed for sitting in for prolonged periods. Within a long programming session, try to get up out of your chair, stretch, get a breath of fresh air, etc. every 30 minutes or so. It will also help you to think more clearly about what you are doing.
• Try to adjust the angle of the screen to minimise the "glare" and consequent strain on your eyes. If you are getting frequent headaches, consider getting your eyes tested—eye strain problems will be more acute if you are in need of glasses.
• Watch out for how long you are spending on a given exercise. It is easy to get bogged down in a blind alley and waste arbitrary amounts of time. If you start an exercise in good time before the deadline, you can ask your lecturer or tutor for hints if it seems to be taking longer than expected.
• Don't be too much of a perfectionist. The extra work involved in raising your mark from 60% to 70% on an exercise that counts for 20% of a course mark would probably only make a difference of about 0.075% in your final degree result. This may well not be worth a sleepless night and the consequent problems of getting behind with other things with the greater loss of marks as a consequence.

If you experience problems with eye strain or tingling or pain in the arms, please make sure that you see your doctor. For people who are experiencing problems, the School may be able to make available corrective devices (e.g., wrist and foot rests).

The following web page may be useful to get more information about the health risks of prolonged computer use and how you can help to avoid them: Amara's RSI Page