#3 Two Weeks of Staying @ Home
At the start of the 21 day nation wide lockdown, I’d hoped to write every week. I still write down my thoughts on almost a daily basis, but had not been publishing on Medium since this ‘task’ always slid further down my priority list, since no one in particular is waiting for it. Most of my other tasks have people who gotta work on the draft I submit or the input I offer. Here’s a quick recap of how I’ve been spending my time, in these very special circumstances when I have absolute say on how I choose to schedule the tasks at hand.
Week 1
In the first week, I prioritized the ‘friends & family’ vertical of my life. I called up my relatives and texted a lot of my friends, especially those who are staying alone through the lockdown. Wished my Telugu friends on Ugadi. Spoke at length to my dad and mom everyday, even spoke to my brother 3–4 times that week. Felt so good, just hanging onto the phone call, listening to the details of his days, the games he’s been playing, the online classes that school has started offering. I guess I narrated my daily routine of, “a couple of hours of office work, 2–3 hours on YouTube, another couple of hours on phone calls” to so many of my relatives that it probably started becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. I shudder to think.
The Sunday of that week, I spent a whopping 5.5 hours talking to my people on the phone. While winding up with the week, I felt like I’d completed a mini-project on keeping my bonds intact. Strangely, ‘connecting with people’ became more of a task on my list than something I engaged with from a need to connect. I realized that I’d never quite empathize with my friends who felt tormented by loneliness. So I watched the Kurzgesagt video on loneliness, and followed it up with watching many other videos on their channel. While all their videos are par excellence, dissatisfaction and their video crafting process that I’d watched even before this lockdown began will remain my favourites. I even played their original soundtracks out loud on my laptop on some nights. Yup, it was one Kurzgesagt and friends-and-family flavoured week.
Work output was low. Even with all this extra time on my hands, on my own grading scale (literal, not figurative), I was working lesser than I’d been during the previous week while I’d been going to office. Oh, did I mention food? I had very little variety in my kitchen, so basically I had oats, rice, green gram and whatever leftover curries I had from the previous week for the entire week. My family was concerned, dad with me ‘getting bored’ and mom with me ‘getting lazy about cooking’, but I reassured them that this had been a choice and that I’d been actively diverting all my time towards things that kept me happy at the moment. At the moment, folks. You know what’s coming up for me the next week. All those waves of misery of not having utilized my time ‘properly’ and not having worked enough.
Week 2
After having spent so much time ‘catching up’ over the phone, I felt kinda sick, the same kind of overwhelmed feeling that leads me to eventually deactivating any social media platform that connects me with people I personally know. I remain curious about people and I always wanna listen to others’ stories, but I prefer HONY over FB for my fill of people’s lives. So this new week, I decided to call up no one and only respond to the calls/texts I received. I hoped that this decision would help divert some more hours towards my office work, where I was starting to feel a little behind schedule.
But it turned out that with my on-the-fly rearrangement of priorities, somehow my office work always came second behind ‘get a handle on your finances/do some investments’. So here I am, the second week past me, having worsened my work score to an all time low, but having improved the finance vertical. Also, I got some vegetables delivered and made some good food.
Also during my low (start of week 2, in case you noticed the dip in the graph) I got a pineapple from a helpful neighbour and I felt so good that I texted my friend, “I’m so happy, I might cry”.
Yup so that’s pretty much it, now looking forward to the third week. Since this “I’m lazing around, getting nothing done, lagging behind on office work, not making any contributions towards this Corona scenario” thought is threatening my emotions vs time graph, let me just take a minute to list down the small accomplishments of the lockdown days so far:
i) Completed listening to ‘Becoming’ and took down notes. Complemented the book with videos of the mentioned speeches and got a background on the US election process.
ii) Enjoyed chapter 2 of ‘The Rise and Fall of Nations’. Have paused the book for a while, until this other higher priority book is (started and) completed.
iii) Read the Kindle sample of ‘Making of a Manager’ that I’d been considering buying, being a fan of Julie Zhuo’s articles on LinkedIn. Realized that it is not exactly relevant to me at the moment, and that I have some great managers in office to learn from.
iv) Listed down my blog/vlog ideas in Airtable. Dunno how long they’ll stay there, but like a lot of young people, I get a lot of ideas, and all of them seem possible. Fiddled about with OneNote, seems like I’ll use it for a while. Dusted up my Workflowy space, it helps me keep track of info that I learn online. Not planning to start using Notion/Roam Research for now.
v) Gave ample time to all my relationships.
vi) Picked up my absolute favourite ‘The Opposite of Loneliness’ after a while. Read a variety of blogs, read and re-read some of Tim Urban. Got so much mind-snacks on Twitter. Read my diary from the grade 12 to college transition time, hilarious. Read my unpublished drafts of Medium. One written a year ago while I was still in college had a particularly promising start.
vii) Formed a better understanding of my finances, investment options
viii) Watched YouTube to my heart’s content. I’ve picked up this habit of sorting the videos of my favourite channels from oldest onwards, so that I get to see how they started out.
ix) Kept myself reasonably updated on the Corono scenario. Unsubscribed from those newsletters whose authors were carrying on with no mention of the virus: I subscribe to you to get a hang of the week, this content that you’re feeding me, that’s not the pressing issue this week my friend. BTW I find the Medium page on Coronavirus a nice dashboard of articles. I check for Andy Slavitt’s articles every night. Learnt the functioning of a ventilator.
x) Kept track of how I was spending my time. At least now I know where it all went.
So that’s it guys, hoping for the best for this upcoming week, fingers crossed.
