Last term was a term like no other; the joys of online lectures and classes opened up a world of possibilities for those among us who can multitask. Whether you were re-listening to a pre-recorded lecture in the background, or boldly turning off your camera and microphone during a live seminar, the opportunities really were endless.

I’ve boiled down the list of activities I’ve managed to get done with a lecture, class, or audio PDF playing in the background over these past few months to just ten of my favourites.

Try them at your peril!

1.) Eating many, many biscuits

If the lid’s still on the tin, are you actually alive or are you just existing? What’s the point? Without custard creams, you may as well give up on your dreams – that’s my motto (it rhymes, therefore it must be true).

2.) Making unnecessarily elaborate notes

Complete with illustrative comic strips, calligraphy and colourful doodles in the margin. This is quite fun, although it makes an hour-long lecture take a whole afternoon. If it’s efficiency you’re after this may not be the one for you…

3.) Folding laundry

This one is genuinely helpful for concentration because it’s surprisingly calming, and it’s great if the aim is to multitask: you can watch a lecture (pausing to scribble down anything relevant, of course) while getting a chore done and problematically daydreaming about giving it all up to become a ‘trad wife’ who has ten kids and irons her husband’s underwear. It may or may not be the highlight of my fortnight.

"Pre’s – meaning ‘pre-staying-in-to-continue-drinking’, of course.”

4.) Pre’s

Pre’s – meaning ‘pre-staying-in-to-continue-drinking’, of course. Studying with a cocktail in hand is such an *aesthetic* and you can pretend to be the most dedicated, studious person in your household for continuing to work around the mayhem. The trick is to not let on that this is due to poor time management rather than your insatiable appetite for knowledge.

5.) Lying in bed and eating marshmallows

I’ve found that each lump of squidgy sugar deepens a pervading sense of gluttonous self-loathing, but also boosts joy. It’s a difficult balance to get right but in general, if you carry on eating marshmallows, you can’t really go wrong. That is, of course, unless this is the first thing you’ve eaten since trying out No 4, in which case things might get a little sticky…

6.) Sleeping

This is the one I’d recommend if you had a lot of fun with No 4, although you do need to be quite skilled in the sleep department. The trick is to wake up first, start the lecture and then snooze with one ear open. If you know the general structure of your lecture/class series then you can stay more alert during the relevant sections and catch an extra forty winks during the others! For example, if you know that there may be class participation in the second half, but the first half is about as interesting as an email from the SU, just wake up halfway through. (Of course, if anyone is reading this that knows me, I definitely haven’t done this and am a very good student.)

7.) Aggressively chopping a bizarrely shaped squash

I did this in preparation for a beautiful lentil and vegetable soup (it ruined my white cords and took the best part of three hours but tasted divine). This one comes with the added bonus of being able to stir a bubbling cauldron of gloop like a witch who needs her five-a-day. Also, you get a whole week’s worth of soup!

8.) Arguing with your siblings

“...the opportunities really were endless.”

When studying from home: arguing with siblings about whether Annabelle is suitable for family viewing or whether, in fact, my brother should stop pestering everyone to watch it with him and just go away and leave us all alone, and I am trying to work so can you please stop fighting over the remote and GO AWAY!

9.) Watching Annabelle with the whole family.

10.) Enjoying the scandalous luxury of being able to burn scented candles now you’re at home.

This involves gathering every candle in your house, placing them on your desk and lighting them all at once, filling your room with a bewildering cacophony of fumes: vanilla, gingerbread, mint, strawberry, and whatever the rest of them smell like. For the full experience tend to them like your little fire babies, giggle with glee when they melt unevenly and you ‘save’ them by chopping them up and distributing spare wax among the withering few, and then try to save your desk when you misjudge the wax quantities and it spills over dangerously near your laptop. Alternatively, simply stare into their flickering flames and ponder the warm abyss of death.

You’re welcome! I hope your academic life will now be enriched and I’m sorry if you end up with a waxy keyboard, although I did warn you not to follow this advice so it’s not my fault if you do...

I will, however, take all the credit if you end up happily full of soup, marshmallows and custard creams.