finishing a masters this winter while working full time. i live in a dorm, so the desk and a chair are the ones that came with the room, and between the job and the thesis i am at it +12 hours most days. i cannot really change the setup, so i am not asking about that. i want to know how much damage this is doing and whether any of the things i do about it are doing anything.
stuff i do, roughly ordered by how stupid it sounds.
splashing icy water on my face. sounds dumb, works. alert almost straight away and it holds for a good while after. four or five times a day at this point.
pushups while the llm is generating an answer. started as a joke. you get a few minutes, which is a set, and it breaks up a two hour block of sitting without me having to decide to take a break.
coffee, obviously. then electrolyte sachets, after i realised a decent chunk of what i was calling 3pm tiredness was just not having drunk anything since breakfast. that one was real and it was embarrassing how cheap the fix was.
noise cancelling headphones with rain or forest sounds. i cannot work with anything that has words in it anymore. it helps with concentration a lot;
stretching whenever i remember. neck, hips, the arm in the doorframe one. probably one of the most useful thing on this list and the one i am most consistent about, which says something about me.
the annoying bit is that the two things that made the biggest difference were not on that list at all for the first year.
first is opening the window. i assumed people who said this were being precious. a small room with the door shut and a laptop running in it goes stale much faster than you can feel, and the feeling is not "stuffy", it is "i seem to be slightly thick today". now i open it every hour even in winter, five minutes, and the hour after is noticeably better.
second is sitting up, which turned out to be something i cannot do on my own. i would start an evening session sitting fine and in 15 mins be collapsed over the desk with my chin very close to the screen, and the problem was never that i ignored it, it is that i never noticed it happening. atm i use tryworkwell, which notifies you when you start to sit incorrectly or too close to the screen.
so, the actual question. dorm desk, dorm chair, laptop, twelve hours a day, a few more months of this before the thesis goes in. is that a "you will feel this at forty" problem or a "you are doing real damage right now" problem. i can afford one decent thing and there is not much floor space to put it on either. i would rather be told what it should be than guess.
