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.
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?