* High school: desk in bedroom. Unaware there are worse options: Productivity: 9.
* College, year 1: dorm with roommate, cop-style desks facing each other. Shut up! Productivity: 4.
* College, years 2-4: two roommates, desk under bed. Vaguely cramped, but not bad. Productivity: 6.
* First ship: Flight of the Intruder style aluminum desk/dresser/bookcase measuring 24" wide, aligned athwartships, so every roll of that frigate dumped my work all over until I hacked some retaining straps in. (http://www.maritime.org/tour/img/fbc/fbc-captain.jpg, except our bunks were 3 high). Productivity: 3.
* Second ship: Double-wide version of same but it's a carrier, no rolling. Productivity: NA because I also an actual office, with a door, and it was right next to wardroom. Downside: back wall of office was next to the trap wires. Had to wear double hearing protection during flight ops. Office productivity: 6-9.
* Staff at the Naval Academy, Annapolis: more desk acreage than I could use, huge vaulted window, rich blue carpet, could hide out all day. Productivity: 0-8. Home office: got an Ethan Allen desk on clearance. Productivity: 6.
* Med school, year 1: Katrina. 5' folding table next to the foldout couch two very kind University of Houston students let me sleep on all year. Still have that folding table. Not bad. Productivity: 6-8.
* Med school, years 2-4, New Orleans: Ethan Allen desk tried in every room of the house, but little kids make it impossible. Productivity at home: 0. Starbucks: 7.
* Internship. Same as above, but also had a cubicle in the 180 desk "resident storage facility". Had no desire to be there and rare could be. Productivity at cubicle: -1.
* First job as a doc: moved to San Diego, converted falling-apart cubicle desk in our office (incidentally the server closet, possibly the only reason it had an air conditioner) into a standing desk. Joy. Could work all day. Had a 34" stool that helped on occasion. 3 officemates: productivity: 5. A Navy clinic, "doctor's office" set up during the weekdays I took clinic, productivity: 4 (they seemed to feel doctors were cheaper than medical assistants). Starbucks: 7.
* Oh, during that job, worked at an urgent care on the weekends: sterile "doctor's office" with a desk and computer. 4 exam rooms. Highly routinized workflow seeing 30+ patients in 12 hours. Productivity: 11.
* Currently: professionally designed cubicle set up in an office with one office mate. We face opposite directions, neither face away from the door. Most productive ever. Productivity: 8-9. Starbucks 7. But also moved my Ethan Allen desk into my bedroom and installed a door lock. Home productivity: 4-8.
My favorite part of the setup was the utterly useless desk safe, easily jimmied open (and then permanently broken) by using two Navy-issue pairs of scissors. Then, invariably, someone would forget to wedge their safe door open and you'd have to barge through staterooms in officer country during heavy seas at 3 a.m. to look for the offending thunk, thunk that was driving everyone insane.
It's not better than the urgent care, but it's on the high end. Mainly, the work is quite interesting and there's lots of it. Case-report quality stuff comes across my desk daily and large studies are in the making. I have dual screen monitors, (also had that at the standing desk at the last job), but I have also customized my world a bit more: I have vim tuned better (works reasonably well with Dragon, but could be better). The office has windows with mini-blinds, which has a peculiar ability to really make the space feel expansive, yet safe from prying eyes. My microscope has dual heads so I put a Magnifi (arcturuslabs.com) on the second head and can take pics at my leisure (see http://reddit.com/r/pathology for unknowns) so that verges on a third screen. Plus my ipad. And I have been planning to move in here for over a year, so I have thought hard about what to do.
And, thanks in part to years of great posts on Hacker News, I'm much better at scripting mundane tasks than the average pathology resident.
I think another thing is that I took up surfing. I'm from Kansas. I go surfing with dolphins at least once a week. I own a home in SoCal, wife and kids are happy and smart. How did I get here?
Cool, so sounds like having a dialed-in routine & setup is a big factor.
It's interesting your productivity goes up in Starbucks. I'm the same way too. Distracting conversations are bad but white noise is fine. Plus there may be something to the whole anonymity thing, in that you don't think about or engage the people around you as much.
It's completely true for me as well. I think knowing that someone might interrupt me at any time (which is true both at work and at home, most of the time) doesn't allow me to fully concentrate as well as I can in a place like a coffee shop or a library.
* High school: desk in bedroom. Unaware there are worse options: Productivity: 9.
* College, year 1: dorm with roommate, cop-style desks facing each other. Shut up! Productivity: 4.
* College, years 2-4: two roommates, desk under bed. Vaguely cramped, but not bad. Productivity: 6.
* First ship: Flight of the Intruder style aluminum desk/dresser/bookcase measuring 24" wide, aligned athwartships, so every roll of that frigate dumped my work all over until I hacked some retaining straps in. (http://www.maritime.org/tour/img/fbc/fbc-captain.jpg, except our bunks were 3 high). Productivity: 3.
* Second ship: Double-wide version of same but it's a carrier, no rolling. Productivity: NA because I also an actual office, with a door, and it was right next to wardroom. Downside: back wall of office was next to the trap wires. Had to wear double hearing protection during flight ops. Office productivity: 6-9.
* Staff at the Naval Academy, Annapolis: more desk acreage than I could use, huge vaulted window, rich blue carpet, could hide out all day. Productivity: 0-8. Home office: got an Ethan Allen desk on clearance. Productivity: 6.
* Med school, year 1: Katrina. 5' folding table next to the foldout couch two very kind University of Houston students let me sleep on all year. Still have that folding table. Not bad. Productivity: 6-8.
* Med school, years 2-4, New Orleans: Ethan Allen desk tried in every room of the house, but little kids make it impossible. Productivity at home: 0. Starbucks: 7.
* Internship. Same as above, but also had a cubicle in the 180 desk "resident storage facility". Had no desire to be there and rare could be. Productivity at cubicle: -1.
* First job as a doc: moved to San Diego, converted falling-apart cubicle desk in our office (incidentally the server closet, possibly the only reason it had an air conditioner) into a standing desk. Joy. Could work all day. Had a 34" stool that helped on occasion. 3 officemates: productivity: 5. A Navy clinic, "doctor's office" set up during the weekdays I took clinic, productivity: 4 (they seemed to feel doctors were cheaper than medical assistants). Starbucks: 7.
* Oh, during that job, worked at an urgent care on the weekends: sterile "doctor's office" with a desk and computer. 4 exam rooms. Highly routinized workflow seeing 30+ patients in 12 hours. Productivity: 11.
* Currently: professionally designed cubicle set up in an office with one office mate. We face opposite directions, neither face away from the door. Most productive ever. Productivity: 8-9. Starbucks 7. But also moved my Ethan Allen desk into my bedroom and installed a door lock. Home productivity: 4-8.
N=1