If you live in the Northern Virginia Area, you can hit the phenomenal Johnson Center at George Mason University.<p>Private group rooms (with whiteboards), a semi-isolated reference area for even more quiet, couches, coffee tables, power at most tables, a movie theater, coffee bar, cafeteria (with everything from a taco bell to chinese food), convenience store, two banks (last I checked), a pretty good uni book store, art exhibitions, a halfway decent restaurant on the top floor and a computer store, parking decks are pretty close and relatively cheap.<p>If even has a private prayer area in case you need to call to a higher power for help with a particularly difficult bug.<p>Wifi requires you to be a student (last I checked), but tether to your phone and you're pretty much all set.<p>If you're working with a distributed team and don't want to shell out $3-4 grand a month on office space, just pay for parking once or twice a week and use this facility.<p>(also, if the Johnson Center is full-up, there's always the Fenwick library across campus that can be even more private since fewer people use it, and I believe most of the technical reference books are stored in the stacks there)
Is being able to work in a university library as a member of the public standard practice in Germany? (Or is the poster an alumnus, perhaps?) I'd love to do that here in the UK but they're key-carded to the hilt.
Getting into a place where Internet connectivity is either not available or is very spotty helps. I've done some of my best programming in trains.<p>Sure, not having access to documentation sucks, but not having access to HN and Twitter compensates for it well :-)
In my experience, simply changing environments may cause an increase in productivity. Even if the new environment isn't strictly better, you still get a boost until you get acclimated. This might be crazy, but some sort of random rotation between various work environments might yield a sustained improvement in productivity.
I have a proper fully equipped office at home, and a designated workplace for the company i run where developers i work with operate. I instead prefer to work from Coffe Shops simply because they offer distractions at such a minimum threshold. It works for me because
A) Crappy Wi-Fi : So i can't stream Youtube or Hulu or download movies or Tv-Series yet not bad enough for me to be able to look up online documentation, parse through StackOverFlow, hold voice calls over Skype or make SVN commits.
B) My external hard disks that contain the bulk-load of my sources of distractions, are no longer a moment's click away.
C)No useless camaraderie, noone ambling by your desk to engage you in menial distracting conversations. It's just me , and my Macbook.
D)For about 10$ (Two coffes per day), i get a serene and beautifully decorated place, that's hot in winters, cold in summers,complete with a comfy Sofa and a little table all my own, and for what is a sheer bonus in this part of the world, no power interruptions ! (7+ hours of no power is regular over here in summers).<p>If i feel a need to have one of my devolepers or my designer collaborate with me more closely than Skype voice calls can afford, i prefer to call them over to the coffee shop rather than go over to the office.It works for the kind of work i do.It may not for everyone. It's cheap, it's comforting, and it's completely distraction free. I get more done in 3 hours over here than in 10 at any other place.
In my experience, almost any productivity "treatment" works at first, until you get used to it. But, I hope I'm wrong and this continues to work out for you.
LoL I always think this will work then I remember WiFi speeds suck compared to my UVerse connection and so I stay at home and the cycle repeats.<p>Glad you made it work though :)