Keeping it together in times of Coronavirus, stories from the trenches
I’m no guru, nor my daily routine will be helpful to everyone. However, by writing this post I’m trying to share a little bit of my experience after spending 31 days in quarantine, also know as Social Distancing.
Back story
I spend almost 200 days a year traveling around the world, in a “normal” situation I’d go to the airport every Sunday and get home every Thursday.
All this suddenly changed as I landed back in Buenos Aires, on March 6th, 2020. I was flying back home from Seattle, WA and since I have friends and family members either pregnant or sick , I decided to go into a “self-imposed social isolation”.
Funny story: When I was ready to resume my life as I knew it, the Argentinean government established the social isolation for everybody. So I’m doubling and probably will be tripling the 14-days that I planned to be at home.
The following advice and tips are the things that worked for me, it might not work for everyone else, but by sharing it I’m also doing some sort of catharsis/reflection of how all this situation changed me and the way I work.
Let’s jump right into it.
My morning routine
I believe that in order to keep it together, I should start my day by taking care of my body, mind and soul.
My day starts like this, I get up and prepare myself a cup of an adjusted version of Bulletproof Coffee, which I’ve been drinking for a couple of months now.
Then, I head to my “office” that also serves as my “yoga studio”, and do 35 minutes of Yoga everyday.
The last part of my morning routine consists on praying, I do this everyday. It’s not that the being locked for so long made me more religious. Even when I’m traveling I carry my Tefilin bag with me. It’s my daily opportunity to reflect on everything I have, and how magnificent life and the world we live in are.
Once I’m done, I head straight to the shower. One thing that I did find useful is not only to shower, which is a no-brainier if you share your house with someone else, but also to dress and wear sneakers as you would do every day.
How’s my working routine?
I’m used to the “remote life”, even when I’m traveling I spend most of my days sitting in front of Zoom/Teams and with my camera and mic on. Yet, when traveling I usually have meetings and events I must attend that also serve as a break throughout my day.
The first couple of days, I found particularly challenging to introduce these breaks into my daily routine, that’s why I developed as System .
Getting Things Done, or my own flavor of it
First, I started by understanding the different tools I work with, and what’s the purpose of each one of these. While working at MURAL, I learnt the concept of “Tool Fatigue”, which was what I was suffering at the beginning of this journey.
So after reflecting upon this analysis for a while, I started using Evernote once again. Basically, I’d write my goals for the day, the things that I’d like to get done, and I go do them (this also includes meetings, and internal comms.).
Once I’m done, the day is over, I try to be strict about this, which it’s why if made a mistake on my planning and I need to wrap up at 9pm or 4:30pm, then it’s all about discipline, and I try to be consistent with this. I treat each one of these mistakes as learning and try to improve my plan for the next day.
I found that discipline is the only thing that helps me keep it together with my job. My lists of TO DOs is infinite and by saying “today I’ll go from A to B” (i.e. establishing boundaries), I’m training my mind to de-stress about the fact of having a never ending list of things to do.
It’s all about the tooling
As you might have seen on the picture above the list of tools that I use is also pretty extensive but other than Evernote, I found these set of tools to be those that contribute the most to my daily “productivity” (if we are still allowed to use such word).
Slack & Teams/Zoom
This trio is my gateway to my teams. Daily I interact with plenty of teams around the company. Even though I’ve been using Slack since the very beginning nowadays I consider it a critical part of my tool-chain.
I start my day here, and if something that I need to discuss with people will take me more than 10 minutes chat, then I use the shortcut to start an ad-hoc meeting on that same channel/conversation and take that discussion IRL.
Basecamp
I re-started my use of Basecamp just last week, but there are 2 or 3 features that make me stick. One is the Daily Check-in, I have that configured with the team that I work with the most, and I read through what they’ve done, so I can provide guidance, feedback or ask questions based on what they are working on.
The other “feature” is the fact that it forces or encourages the “async” collaboration. I love Slack but starting a big thread on things that you need to think or reflect may result on it either being watered down or just too impulsive.
The discussion boards are way better than email, I love email, don’t get me wrong. For me it’s (email) the cornerstone of business, and for a while it has been my primary TO DO list. I keep inbox zero, but when it comes to collaboration and co-design threads are simply too hard to follow.
MURAL
I’m completely biased with this tool, not only because I spent 6 years of my life working on it, but because I believe the mission the company has.
I’m a very whiteboard-fan person, and one of the challenges that I found was that I now that we have more time to think, reflect and design the de facto tool doesn’t scale to this new reality.
I’ve been running co-design, co-creation workshops with the people I work with for the last month using MURAL in conjunction with Zoom Breakout Rooms, and it’s A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.
I won’t go into much detail on the tool, as I said I’m biased, but if you want to run a quick session of brainstorming or plan your week with a team, it might be worth checking out.
How did my “management style” change?
I started working strong on communication. Now uncertainty is queen, and dealing with it causes a lot of stress, anxiety and angst.
“Over-communicating”, if there’s such thing, I rather use it to reduce anxiety, foster team spirit, and share as much as I can of our strategy, hopes and fears. In the end we’re all in this together, as we’ve ever been.
Focus on the bright-side, I might be too optimistic but I’m sure that times like these have such a powerful transformation effect on people. I firmly believe that after this quarantine, we are going to be better, stronger and smarter than how we got here. It’s an opportunity, for those who want to take it. That’s why I try to emphasize the good things that happen every week.
If as human beings we’re contagious, let’s start by spreading positivity and shed some light into this world.
My unwind routine
As I said before, I don’t have an exact time of the day that this routine comes into play, but I try to keep it normal.
As soon as I’m done with the work stuff, I head to the kitchen where we keep our hydroponic garden. I found myself a looking at these plants, which also serves as reflection that the world hasn’t stopped, and even while at home time goes by.
I also reunited with one of my eldest hobbies: Gaming. Since the quarantine started I already played Civilization V which I bought 5 years ago and I never played. I’m right now playing Start Wars — The Fallen Order and as soon I finish it, I’ll go for Sekiro, which won the game of the year award.
Then, we have dinner as usual, but one thing that did change was the fact that now we’re cooking all our food at home, and we even feed from the greens of our garden.
At bedtime, we do a News detox, I don’t let news shows, newspapers, or even talk shows into our bed room. We might binge some other Netflix show (we’re currently watching The Crown) or simply watch re-runs of Friends, The Big Bang Theory or Seinfeld.
That’s how I keeping it together, if there’s only person that might find this useful, then I’m already happy with this.
I close with a phrase I’ve been thinking about lately:
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.
Rabbi Tarfon on Micah 6:8
Stay home, stay healthy!
