In the crazy and stressful consultancy’s world, it is important to fell physically and “digitally” comfortable while doing our job. With this idea in mind, I am leaving here my tips about how to work better, taking care of your working space, and also some software recommendations, with the objective to improve your productivity.

Work Space

External Monitor

I consider mandatory to have an external monitor to work efficiently and healthier as a consultant. This can sound obvious to the major part of the reader, but there are consultants that still work just with the laptop’s monitor.

There are many advantages by using one (or more) external monitor, instead of just the laptop’s monitor:

• Your head don’t need to be always looking done. Google “correct sitting position at desk”. (a work around for this is to buy a stand or put a box under the laptop)
• You don’t need to be so close to the monitor, that is better for your eyes’ health.
• You will be able to organize better you desktop’s layout and split windows.
• You will be able to see, without scrolling, more content of the documents, spreadsheets, code during debug, etc.
• You will be able to read content in online meetings without been 10 cm from the screen
• You dedicate a really good amount of time in your live looking at a monitor. Improving the experience, will definitely improve your live.

If you already have a monitor, or you are thinking about buying one (or ask one to your company), have a look on the next tips about how to improve your experience:

• Stand – If possible, get a monitor with an adjustable stand. If not possible, buy an adjustable stand. Since you will be looking at it all the time, at least put it in a comfortable position. They are cheap and can increase your work experience.
• Size – Think about the size of the monitor, considering if you would like 1 or 2 monitor in your working space. I personally use a 27″ monitor, but I recommend you to go physically to a store and see how the sizes of the monitors looks like and fell what size suits you better. Don’t be afraid to but something to big, you eventually get use to it. Consider that if you would like to work with more that one monitor, probably you would like to buy smaller monitors. Don’t forget that you can still use your external monitor as the main monitor, and your laptop as a secondary monitor.
• Resolution – If you have an old laptop, I would not recommend an high resolution monitor like QHD or 4K. This could make your laptop even slower.
• Adjustments – Don’t forget or be afraid to play around with the contrast and the brightness. It is important the be comfortable looking at it. If you feel burning eyes or headache at the end of the day, consider lower the brightness, and if possible eliminate light reflections on the monitor. The reflections can be forcing you the have an higher brightness. If the problem persist you definitely should go to a doctor.

Mouse, Keyboard and Headphones

These are the other components that you use communicate with your computer. They don’t look relevante, but they are because you use them more than 40h a week.

I will start with what I consider the most important of them – the mouse. There are two main features that I want you to consider, in order to analyze if your mouse is good for you or not. The first and more important is the shape. Small mouses can be good for traveling, but for your every day work. Your hand is always kind closed, and in the long term you will fell that something is not OK with your hand and wrist tendons. Search for a mouse that you can actually grab and it can actually support your hand. You should fell that you can hold it the rest of your live and your hand is really supported by it.

The second feature that I consider important is the buttons. I cannot live anymore without the copy and paste in the side buttons of my mouse. We are always copy and pasting stuff: ABAP code, document, messages, columns on spreadsheets… My little finger starts to hurt if for example in a business trip I forgot the mouse at home (ctrl+c ctrl+v). I also really like the F8 in the scroll button.

Currently is really cheap to buy a mouse that is comfortable and have configurable side buttons, where you can configure what ever you want. I personally use the MX Master 2S from Logitech, and it is just perfect for me (but yeah… it is expensive).

About the keyboard and the headphones there is not much to said. If you are thinking about buying a keyboard, please consider the noise (there are people that like the “click” sound and others that hate it) and don’t mess it up with the language. About the headphones, if you use it a lot on work for meetings or music, and you are thinking about buying new headphones, don’t go cheap. Not because of the quality, but because of the shape. Try headphones on stores to make sure that you buy something comfortable and not something that will smash your ear all day. If you like earphones, that is fine as well.

Environment, Desk and Chair

It is important that the environment where you work suites your working needs. This aspect is very subjective so my advice here is for you to really think on the matter and try to identify problems on your environment. If you work from home, pay attention if your environment allows you to have calls without noise, it has no distraction that can break your concentration and, in case it is difficult for you to disconnect from the work, think about separate your workstation to a more isolated place of the house.

Working on the office, my biggest advice is to pay attention how many times a day you are interrupted by your collages. These interruptions can have a huge impact in your productivity.

Your desk should be clean and organized, with space for all your stuff for you to feel good during the working day. Feeling that you are been “smashed” by your stuff, where you don’t even have space to move your mouse, is not a good working experience.

Last but not least… the chair. The place where you will be seated all day long. If you work from home, please don’t use just a random chair that you found. Have mercy on your back, otherwise she will give you pain with no mercy as well. Here, I am giving the same advice that I gave for the monitor and the headphones, just go to a store and try chairs. You should sit and fell that the chair can support you and your back properly. Be careful if you are going with a cheap gaming chair, that usually look good and feel good the first 10 min, but some times they are to tough and after 8h a day they can give you back pain as well. If you want to buy something cheap, I suggest an IKEA office chair. If you are a sweaty person you should go for the mesh office chairs. They are comfortably fine, and the airflow is really a game change for sweaty people.

I barely sweat, so I have a SecretLab Titan leather chair (if you sweat to much, I don’t recommend leather). Is one of the best gaming chairs in the market, my wife loves it when she use it. I don’t love it, but I have to admit… it saved by back. In my opinion the seat is very tough, so I use thin pillow to compensate it. But the truth is that before this chair I used an 8 year old office chair that was definitely not comfortable. At the end of the day I felt my back tired and I also had back pain. After changing chair I didn’t felt my back tired anymore, and the back pain started to disappear. Because the chair is tough I started having pain in other parts of my back, but after some weeks my body gets used to the chair, and now I fell amazing. Also, don’t forget to pay attention to your posture, just the chair will not improve anything if you have a wrong posture.

Software

Operational System – Windows

For a SAP consultant that is it. If your company gives you a mac and you cannot return it, I recommend you to ask for a virtual machine and windows license.

If you don’t have Windows, you are forced to use the SAP GUI for JAVA (for IOS and Linux), that is really a bad experience. The major down sides that I can quickly point are:

• Ugly
• Slow
• Excruciatingly slow during debug
• Cannot open any Microsoft Word integrations, for example in forms.
• Cannot open Workflows

For a manager profile the SAP GUI for JAVA is probably fine, in case that you just use it occasionally. But for a pure consultant I definitely don’t recommend it.

Task Manager – Trello

One of the most important tools for any consultant is the task manager software. It allow us to organize and priorize our work in order to deliver the functionalities within the deadlines. For many years I used the Todoist, but I changed to Trello. It was strange at the beginning, but after some weeks, I concluded that is more adequate for my needs. Todoist or Microsoft Task are softwares more useful on our personal life kind of tasks. Professionally I believe that Trello is much better.

Password Manager – KeyPass

Unfortunately, there are still people that stores passwords in text files or spreadsheets. It is really scary how common this is, and how people simple doesn’t care about cybersecurity at all.

I personally use the KeyPass. It’s an open source software used to store passwords encrypted in a file. You can have this file in your computer, or in your favorite cloud to be accessible anywhere. I use it because:

• I have control of my data, and where the passwords are stored;
• It is really easy to use;
• It works on many operational systems
• I can open the SAP GUI directly from it, by adding the command line in the URL field: cmd://sapshcut -sysname={TITLE} -client=100 -user={USERNAME} -pw={PASSWORD} . At the beginning of my working day I just put the password to open the KeyPass, and then I don’t need to use passwords any more with this URL command option.

Time Tracker

If you feel that you are working to much, I suggest the installation of a time tracker. It will allow you to control how much time you are working to see if you are exceeding to much the 40h week. I have put my limit to 42:30h a week and I try my best to don’t work more than that. Doing many work hours can lead to imbalance between personal and profissional live, lower productivity per hour, depression and willing to leave your project (you are doing this for you and for your company to not lose you).

A good time tracker software should start automatically when you turn on your computer and stop automatically when you suspend it or shut it down. This will track your pure work time, excluding the pauses during the day.

Here I don’t leave any recommendation because unfortunately I have a mac and there is no much free choices. I use Clockify but is very slow.

Knowledge Base – Obsidian

A knowledge base software allows you to organize your “knowledge” in a way that is easy for you to search something in case you need it. Is very rare find someone that knows what it is or uses it.

For me it is an important tool in my work particularly because I do a little bit of everything (SAP FICA, SAP CI, ABAP coding…) and it is difficult to store all the knowledge in my brain. As everyone else, I used documents and spreadsheet to store information that I think I will need in the future but at the end… when I needed something… I never found it. So I search about the topic and I found that exist appropriated software to store “stuff”. I would like to challenge you to make an internet search on the topic to see if this type of tools can improve your work.

I use Obsidian because it is very versatile:

• I can attach any kind of file;
• It has a good plugin library
• I can search content easily
• I can store data locally or in a cloud
• It has support for multiple platforms.

Because it creates “Markdown files” (that can be opened by any text editor), one day if I want to change to other software, it can be done easily.