dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

COVID-19: day 3 of working from home


We live in interesting times. Countries are in a situation they have not been for multiple decades, if at all. Lots of people will not even remember the last time a situation like this happened. Our prime minister had a historic speech on television (a good one, in my opinion), the first time since the oil crisis in 1973(!) that a Dutch prime minister even did such a speech.

Meanwhile, social and commercial life is shutting down piece by piece.

Sure feels surreal.

For me, today was day number three of working from home, day five of 'my' Corona/COVID-19 count. I started counting the day my company decided to do everything remotely (this coincided with the day that The Netherlands started to take things seriously, and people started raiding the supermarkets for toilet paper because, well, no reasons at all really). Days before we already started doing more and more remotely (even more than some of my team already did by default), and today I even did a workshop over video conference software for a client, together with a colleague. It even went rather smoothly :)

So, while everyone is adjusting to a life being based more around our homes than our offices, we are also adjusting to new daily rhythms, juggling work tasks, suddenly home schooling our kids, with teachers scrambling to provide materials, methods, and structure for kids and parents to apply at home.

Maybe we even have some moments of reflection about how we were living our lives until now, and what things have changed currently; maybe we even want to incorporate some of these elements in the life after this period: more working from home, more flexible hours, maybe not working so much and spend more time with your kids and/or other loved ones? Who knows, we sure live in interesting times, which I even think feel like some big social experiment. Lets see what comes out of all of this, without a big toll on our collective lives, in both a literal sense, and the added complexity of juggling the tasks we suddenly face.

Take care of each other, and of yourself.

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