Ruthless prioritization
Here’s a look at my current schedule during this social distancing period, due to COVID-19:
7am-12:00pm is daddy daycare. Our 15-month-old daughter is home safe with us, but we’ve lost our daycare until April 27 at the soonest. So I take the morning shifts so my wife (a PhD and very career-driven individual like me) can work.
12:00 is family lunch. Then my daughter naps and we clean up.
1:00 to 5, I get in some work while my wife stays with our daughter.
At night, it’s business as usual, as if nothing changed: dinner, bath time, bedtime routine. Then we squeeze in a couple more hours until bed.
(This part is usually sprinkled with furtive checks of the news and social media, as we finally have time to do what our brains have been low-key thinking about all day: coronavirus.)
This is exhausting. It’s stressful. It’s downright unsustainable. And it’s far from unique. This is affecting everyone.
I’d also point out that I have it FAR easier than most people. By “most,” I mean my sister- and brother-in-law (she is pregnant, and they have two kids under 5 already; they just moved to a new house and aren’t fully unpacked). I mean my 91 year old grandmother, who just had surgery and is recovering in a hospital without visitors allowed. (She’s looking stronger every moment and should return home soon. Her surgery had nothing to do with COVID-19.)
Of course, by “most people,” I also mean people I don’t know: families who depend on school lunches to feed their kids, freelancers whose clients have left them, and whose government doesn’t understand them enough to include them in legislation, restaurant and other service workers who can’t work from home and whose employers have gone on hiatus overnight, and the vast majority of people on this earth with little support and no savings.
What. A. Mess.
We all feel it. In a weird, twisted way, it’s nice to see how intertwined we all are. Everything is affecting everything else, because everyone is connected to everyone else. Even the richest among us can not function without the most vulnerable in our society. Lord knows, we should all recognize this connectedness more during “normal” days. Society would be better for it.
Anyway, I am infinitely grateful for our health and safety relative to most, but this is still a major adjustment for me and my family, and major adjustments of any kind, for anyone, are hard.
Lately, since I’m so pressed for time, I’m forced to ruthlessly prioritize what does and doesn’t get my attention for work. It would be an impossible decision if not for a few key concepts I can retreat to when I need to reset and refocus and regain a sense of clarity during the chaos.
Today, I just wanted to let you know that we’re all struggling and to share with you the things that, at least for work, have helped me ruthlessly prioritize only what matters most. May they help you too…
Aspirational anchors. (This is mine.)
The tradeoff in every career (knowing that I made this tradeoff myself, and revisiting the preference I have along this spectrum, routinely helps me navigate ambiguity and frustration)
That’s plenty to get started. Good luck with your own schedule, and stay healthy and focused on what matters — in work and at home, which for more people than ever, are the same location. 💛
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