Future of Work: Time to Make the Donuts (part 1)
We are living in a dark-timeline Groundhog Day. Every day certain variables are held constant. It’s on us to make additive changes each day while trying to manage our dwindling bank accounts, children who need care, and our bills and debt.
It is hard.
We’re having Kafka dreams, and if the news is on for too long and you’re stuck inside your head it can become unbearable.
Feel like having a few cocktails and living it up?
Go ahead.
Pajamas all weekend?
Weird flex, but okay.
Want to grow a struggle beard?
Fine — suit yourself.
Forgo exercise till you’re let outside?
Not a great way to keep your steel sharp, but your prerogative as long as you stay home.
Want to know why you should stay at home and socially distance till you can’t bear it, then try some more?
Read Kayode’s brush with COVID — part 1 and part 2.
If the scales have fallen from your eyes and you’re stepping on the scale, see Harry’s post for his practical tips on keeping your body in motion when you can’t move.
After a while, eating ice cream for breakfast becomes empty and less fulfilling than when you started. Every day provides an opportunity to take on the 4th thing on your list of top 3 most essential items. You will never get this time again.
Maybe you’ll throw yourself into a long-forgotten task, and revisit it with your COVID time: there are books to be read on your shelf or in digital format, puzzles to be put together by yourself or with others, pictures waiting to be drawn, or conversations to be had on social platforms with friends you have not connected within a long time.
Maybe you’ll take on a new activity that leaves you struggling with a burgeoning skill and expanding capability. It’s all out there for the learning and remixing: in those books, or on the internet — DuoLingo for new languages, Udemy, Coursera, Khan Academy, Nana Appliance Repair, or YouTube for new skills.
An internal voice may tell you that you don’t have enough time for it.
This is a lie — please don’t listen to it.
Parkinson’s law is the adage that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
We see evidence of this in our daily lives — some schools are shifting their programming and instruction from f2f to gavage-by-Zoom. Some workplaces are trying to fill your contracted day with endless meetings to make sure you’re working. I have sympathy and empathy for all involved — I’m trying to manage my work and co-parent my kids too. I feel your pain. But more forced synchronous communication given our constraints is the wrong way to do it, and a topic for another post.
I’m here to tell you that if you have only 15–30, that’s more than enough to use it for yourself.
I’m of the mindset of Epsilon Theory: make, protect, teach.
We are amid a pause like we have never seen. Everything has slowed down, and we’re left to contemplate our unnatural stasis, with burgeoning thoughts of how we are going to spend our free time.
During our stasis, we have two choices — we can choose to be a snake, amid molt and shedding our skin because we’re growing more prominent.
Or we choose to be a humble caterpillar, sheltering in place in our cocoon, metamorphosizing.
Choosing to be a snake means you believe that post-COVID19, the world will go back to normal.
Choosing to be a caterpillar means you believe that post-COVID19, the world will be irrevocably changed.
The reality is that the world itself will continue to be — but we will emerge changed.
We are unsure of the new normal, but we know we have experienced a once-in-a-generation shift.
I can’t tell you whether you will emerge this cycle as a moth or a butterfly. But spend a small amount of your time in improving you — increasing your knowledge and capabilities, and you will emerge with wings to greet the world that you previously only saw with a vantage point a few millimeters from the ground.
Time to make the donuts.
This is part 1 in a series on the Future of Work. Part 2 and Part 3 are here.
