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- I am a freelancer and a student, so opinions relating to time management and scheduling are appreciated as well.
- My eyes hurt!!
There is no substitute for this, and it represents 80% of the "cure".
(numbers pulled out of my descending colon)
I used to do something similar to you - 12 hours coding every day, with a couple of hours of Counterstrike, for about 3 years. I thought I was being very productive. But then I started to measure my effectiveness (purely out of interest rather than any belief I wasn't working well) - I measured my billable hours, lines of code, commits, issues fixed, etc. Over the course of about 3 months I found that I did less work when I was in front of the screen for 12 hours compared to 8 hours. Spending more time in front of my computer reduced my effectiveness. I put the reasons down to the fact I could do exercise, sleep better, have a social life, etc - by being healthier I work better. That said, my Counterstrike skills completely disappeared, so there were downsides.
My suggestion would be to take a few hours to build something that tracks how well you work, and then vary the hours you put in for a while. See what happens.
Regarding your eyes, try to make your screen brightness match the ambient level of light in your environment, sit at a distance where you don't need to actively focus (use glasses if necessary), and pick a theme for your IDE that's quite dark. The less work your eyes have to do the better.
After every 20 mins look at a point that is atleast 20 feet away from you for atleast 20 seconds for your eyes.
For productivity - what helped me a lot was to block myself on my home router from accessing all distractive web pages I used to pop in every now and then (i.e. playok.com for just one chess game, linkedin, facebook, ycombinator :-) ) - I found that my brain loves to be distracted and it is not that simple to keep focused, blocking distractors helped. Having that said I was also allowing emails in certain hours in the morning and in the evening (no emails during the day).
Also I completely cut on my favorite games (even during the weekend) like HalfLife, CS, starcraft... Was hard to make this decision but in the end appeared to be a great time saver.
- get your eyes tested. I have small astigmatism, not enough for glasses, but it was causing headaches. I got glasses anyway.
- Recheck your eyes every year. Eyes lens will flex once you wear glasses
- Buy large sound isolating headphones, not in-year.
- Play single song in loop
- Get a bigger screen, even cheap 20" will do. Laptop has horrible ernomomy
- Investigate ergonomic keyboards. Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 or Microsoft Sculpt are good starting choice.
- Try inverted colors. Most editors have colors schemes, try Solarized, Dark Vim etc..
- For browser most sites (github) can be styled black using Stylish browser plugin
- All operating systems (even Android) supports inverted color accessibility settings. Control-Option-Command-8 key combination on Mac.
- Reduce time spend in front of computer by improving your productivity. It is much less draining if you actually enjoy your work and see results fast.
If you use a laptop, get a stand and a separate keyboard and mouse, it'll help your posture. If you have a desktop, it'll be easier to maintain a good posture and relieve neck pain by looking to what's in front of you, not down to a laptop on a table.
Walk. Get up every hour or every 45min. Do this religiously.
Drink lots of water or tea. Stay hidrated. Don't eat garbage.
To have better sleep, install flux on your computer.
If you have some spare money, buy a really comfortable office chair that's not too sofa-y and not too hard. Buy a table that has the right height to you.