Dealing with Stress at the Computer Pt.IV

Organizing your computer system for the work you do can help you reach peak
performance levels. Bookmarking frequently visited Web sites into neat
categories is worth the time it takes to do.

Keeping your email inbox and other folders as empty as possible is another useful productivity technique. Reply to all emails as soon as you can so that you do not have a backlog building up. If you have multiple email accounts, consider using a computer application that will allow you to centralize these accounts on your desktop so that you are not having to go all over the place to retrieve email.

Having an office software
package installed on your system is pretty much compulsory these days for
nearly any line of work. Fortunately, you do not have to spend hundreds of
dollars on commercial office packages anymore; the open-sourced OpenOffice is a freely available and highly competitive piece of office software that will run
on many different platforms. There are plenty of freeware utilities out there
that make your life easier, everything from scientific calculators to password
managers to world clocks that sit on your desktop and display the time for all
major cities around the globe (a great help given the international nature of
much Internet-based work).

Of course, having an organized computer means nothing if you are working out of
a waste dump. Reducing clutter and having a neatly organized room or office
seems to have a similar effect on your mind. “You are where you work” is the
motto here. Have plenty of space in which to move around, but do not strive for
the warehouse effect where you are walking fifty meters just to retrieve a pen
and a piece of paper — assuming you still know what pens are.

One of the biggest sources of computer-related stress is losing access to your
important data. If you are heavily dependent on reliable access to your work
data, it is absolutely imperative that you plan for data-loss contingencies.
Perform frequent saves of any files you are currently working on, creating a
duplicate copy every now and then so that you have a rollback option in the
case of disastrous edits. Perform routine backups of your data on external
media. If your budget allows for it, consider purchasing an uninterrupted power
supply (UPS) so that you can either continue working during a power outage or
save your work and turn off your computer gracefully. Forgetting passwords is
another way to lose access to your data, so if you have been known to have the
memory of a goldfish, find a solution in the form of a password-management
utility, either a software program or one of the many physical devices that
have appeared on the market in recent years. Whether you have a dial-up
Internet account or fast broadband access, if constant Internet access is
mission critical for your work, you can avoid many common stressful situations
by having a separate, low-cost dial-up account with a different Internet
service provider. Finally, investing a little time, money, and effort in a
basic computer-repair course will pay you back many times over when it comes to
easily fixed computer problems that seem to strike only on weekends or during
the early hours of the morning.

Learning a computer programming language will allow you to automate many of the
tasks that form your grunt work and enable you to concentrate on those things
that humans do best. If you start out with a simple scripting language such as
Perl, Python, or Ruby, you will discover that programming a computer is not as
daunting as it would first appear — in fact, it can be a great deal of fun.
You may even find that your burgeoning programming skills can earn you some
extra income as a freelance coder.