Good point. Another option (as Randy mentions in his talk) is to schedule a "fake" class during the dead hour. Just go to the same spot in the library every day and work on the same class. Office hours are useful for this purpose as well.
I sort of did this during my undergrad. But instead it was essentially 9-5 minus whatever classes I had. I would just spend any time not in class during the work day to work on class work unless I had every assignment done. It helped me get ahead and then I could just relax in the evenings because I knew I'd have time to work on things later in the week.
In many classes it's much easier to do productive work in an hour than at most programming jobs. Programming jobs tend to be structured in terms of large projects/milestones, while classes tend to have smaller goals or problems on the problem sets that can be done in < 1 hour. And if all else fails, reading a text book for an hour can be quite productive, and it's nice to let the information settle in your brain before applying it anyway.
