Definitely some great food for thought here... thanks!!
Congrats on your progress! When my wife's in certain parts of her gargantuan hospital (for humans), there's no cell service. She always has books, magazines, and printouts from medical journals to keep her busy when there's no escaping and no phone distractions (and no more notes to write or dictate). I'd be curious whether your employer allows that.
I currently only receive one in-print veterinary journal. I usually read it at home, but definitely could put it in my purse to take to work for reading there. Excellent idea! As for the online info sources that I keep up with, printing lengthier articles to read at work is also a great idea. Thanks!!
How about doing some physical stuff (stretching, etc) and/or short meditations to try to calm that active brain of yours a bit.
Great idea. I could probably work in some squats or something and get exercise, too!
So, my PT vet job is back on a "no cell phones at work" kick... which has me thinking that maybe I WON'T stay here indefinitely after all.
At the risk of sounding like a total entitled bitch... dude, I'm a doctor. I'm an adult. I'm not a high school kid working retail. I have an IQ in the top 0.01% and the only thing that allows me tolerate the mind-numbing nature of my job is being able to surf MMM, Facebook, NY Times etc. to feed my brain a bit all the little 3-5 minute chunks of downtime between appointments. (Not to say that test scores are everything, but I've finally acknowledged that I'm just as out of place in the normal world as a person with an IQ in the bottom 0.01%.) Now I'm just supposed to stare at the wall or gossip with the techs? Really? I'm thinking about pulling out my book... they didn't say no books!
So, yeah. If they stay on this kick for long, I may rethink my plan.
This is going to sound harsh, but your response to this cell phone policy is completely disproportionate to what would be rational.
You know what you’re feeding your brain when checking your phone? It’s not information to satisfy your insatiable appetite for knowledge due to your incredibly high IQ. It’s dopamine. That’s it. You’re addicted to your phone. Just like the rest of us. I don’t believe for a second that someone who is apparently one of the 35,000 smartest people in the country gets their intellectual itches scratched by 3 minute doses of Facebook and MMM. Nope. It’s not like you’re doing particle physics in your spare time there.
And if your job is so mind numbingly boring that the only way you can survive your part time hours is by constant distraction / dopamine hits, then that’s reason right there to move on. Not because your fix won’t be available, but because it’s not a challenging enough job.
Your attitude on this has actually motivated me to reduce my phone time substantially. I hope you do the same.
So, I gave this a lot of thought this afternoon. While I don't want to say that I don't have SOME element of phone addiction (because really, I get the research), the truth is that I've always a high level of what I would call "information addiction." This has been a lifelong issue (problem?) for me.
Some random examples:
- I learned to read at 2.5 years old. By sometime in elementary school, I had read all of the books in my home (although, admittedly, Dianetics and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance were totally lost on me at that age!!).... so I started reading the encyclopedia. No joke. I'd pick a topic, read the entry, then see what thoughts that triggered and follow them to another entry. For hours and hours.
- I always read books at school during any free moment of downtime, to the point that I would literally walk into trees or other students because I was reading while walking between classes.
- When I was 16 and finally able to drive myself to the county library and get a library card, I spent my entire winter break researching homeschooling. It wasn't an option for me and I didn't know anyone considering homeschooling, but I somehow became fascinated by the issue and decided to read multiple books on the issue so that I could form an educated opinion. I don't know why I remember that so clearly, but it was a fabulous few weeks. I'd spend all day at the library, check out books to take home at night, and had an entire notebook full of thoughts, ideas, opinions, citations, etc. (WTF? Who does that?)
- In college and vet school, I read for fun like crazy (walked into a lecture hall and pulled out a book until the second the professor started speaking), took as many electives as possible, and randomly found related or unrelated topics to research and obsess over. The coursework was never enough. Usually, what I was learning on my own was totally unrelated to my academics.
- I can't remember the last time I listened to music. I'm all podcasts, all the time.
In the pre-internet/pre-smartphone days, books served the same purpose as my phone (and still do).... there's always a book in my bag. It's just less socially acceptable to pull out a book (whether fiction or nonfiction) and read a few pages while leaning up against a counter at work than to pull out your phone and read a quick article. When you're reading an article, people assume you're just texting or watching silly cat videos.
Reading all that makes me sound incredibly bizarre, but I DO pass as normal-ish in many situations. For a little while, anyway. LOL.
And I totally agree on needing to leave the boring work, but I haven't found anything more stimulating in my rural area. That's my goal behind FI, or at least going to part-time. Less busy work (corporate vet med is a lot like retail), more intellectual stimulation. That's also why I like the writing - it's so much more interesting and engaging than vaccines and customer service.
FWIW, I don't think you're a bitch for being irritated about the no phones policy, but I do think you would benefit from some self-reflection around why you feel like your "top 0.01% IQ" means that you can't spend a few minutes "gossiping with the techs" between appointments, as if the idea of chatting with people who are not as objectively successful as you is completely beneath you. In fact, it sounds like dropping your phone and spending some QT with your coworkers instead (even if they are just loooowly techs) would do you a bit of good.
First of all, I definitely don't love my current job. I tolerate it and I feel that I'm well paid for 15 hrs/wk. I still watch the clock and wait for the days to end, but it's just 2 short days per week. The rest of my workweek, which is the freelance writing? THAT is the part of the week I love. Much better suited to my personality - more interesting, more flexible, and I'm just better at it.
Anyway, I probably didn't express myself correctly, based on your comment above. In general, I'm an introvert book nerd who is more comfortable reading a book or magazine than talking. Has nothing to do with who is on my level or beneath me - the same thing applies with other veterinarians. If there isn't time for a substantial conversation in which I can learn something new, I don't really have any interest in small talk... and it's hard to have substantial conversations in the few minutes overlap that we have between exam rooms. Every now and then it happens, but not often - usually it's more complaining about clients and that sort of thing.
Maybe the IQ thing has nothing to do with it... but when my husband suggested a few years ago that he thought I had Asperger's, I did some research on Asperger's that led me towards some research on gifted adults. I kind of assumed the high-IQ thing lost relevance once I reached adulthood, but a lot of books and articles suggest that it doesn't and that it could maybe explain a lot of my bizarre tendencies. That's when I actually looked into my percentile. (I'd always known it was top 2%.... just learned about a year ago that it was top 0.1% - NOT top 0.01% as I mistyped earlier.) And who knows, maybe it has no relevance to why I find most jobs so insanely boring after the first month or two, but it seems like it could.
Anyway... for today, I just focused on taking my full allotted appointment time with each and every client. I answered all of their questions thoroughly, chatted them up, played with their puppies (if they weren't too aggressive), and basically stayed in each room until I knew my next room was ready for me. Drove the techs and practice manager crazy since it wasn't super-efficient, but the clients loved it and I enjoyed it, too!