I estimate that in the last few years, I’ve met thousands of new faces and names. At first I was pretty quick with remembering everyone, even the less memorable, not that that’s a bad thing. I would use mnemonic devices to quickly learn the names of dozen of people. When I started medical school and met almost 200 other medical students, I was proud of learning 80% of names in the first week. However, as time has gone on and i’ve become more tired and overworked (although self-inflicted), this skill has become harder and harder to maintain. The turnover of new people I meet working locums is at a new level. Not only are my learning hundreds of new names monthly, from nurses, to respiratory therapists, to secretaries, to janitors, but I’m doing this while trying to remember my passwords for each hospital I work at. I have a different email address, login name and password for each hospital I have to remember. I write everything down in word documents and excel spreadsheets to stay neurotically organized – the moment I don’t take weekly time to streamline life, double check my calendar and update my passwords, is the moment everything falls apart. I literally spend a good 2-4 hours per week double checking and re-organizing my schedule, lest I end up touching down in a town without a place to stay for the night.

I am meticulous to a new level to work the way I do. Growing up, the two fictional characters I wanted to model my neo-Renaissance Man character goal to be were Terry Benedict from Ocean’s 11 and Jason Bourne from The Bourne Film Series. As a side note, this was part of my inspiration earlier in life prior to Medical School of working on becoming a Polyglot (something i’ve lost time for with the whole ‘doctor’ thing). I wasn’t one of those A++ individuals i’ve come across through the years that was wired to be a machine, but I’ve always secretly wanted to be. I wasn’t the top of my class by any means in medical school or Residency, I was mediocre at best, so trying to upgrade that workability has been a challenge. But the one thing that I’ve learned has made things fall together throughout the years, despite my non-natural tendency for neurotic work habits of that level, is Organization.

I have MULTIPLE spreadsheets tracking Taxes, Locum Jobs, Personal Expenses, Reward Expirations and even Long Term Goals. And, while I’ll keep those all personal, I felt the need to share some of my schedule or potential schedule with anyone that’s interested in what my life looks like as a full-time locum tenens provider. The most important part of this; however, is realizing that my schedule can fall apart at any minute given the volatility of work doing Locum Tenens. ***The greyed out ones are the months i’ve already successfully survived 😅***