COVID-19: The Gift of Time and Space

Photo by Jackson Hendry on Unsplash

Photo by Jackson Hendry on Unsplash

A caveat: As a mom to two girls, ages 12 and 9, I feel for parents who are currently working a double-shift— simultaneously trying get work done and adjusting to working from home while also homeschooling / entertaining their children. This article about the gift of time and space will likely evoke frustration or jealousy for those not working the double-shift. If you’re trying to just make it through the day without erupting at your partner or kids… you’ve got plenty on your hands right now.

It’s been a week of shelter-in-place for us in San Francisco. As a friend, as a neighbor, and as a leadership coach, I’ve been getting most of my energy this week from service. Service for me is spending more time with clients, leading support calls with friends, and doing group coaching for a variety of my communities. Most of my day-to-day work is remote, other than the now-canceled in-person workshops and speaking engagements. I’m grateful that I’ve already been able to learn to adjust with working from home and developing meaningful connections with people over video conference.

Right now, all routines have become completely up-ended. Everything is seemingly out of our control. We don’t have the luxury of going out to dinner, meeting up with friends in a bar, going to the gym, or watching movie or plays. As a leadership coach, I often point out that my biggest competition is the status quo. COVID-19 is currently disrupting that. Now our daily routines feel uncertain and out of our control. This is an opportunity to re-examine regular habits and schedules. Typically, these habits are engrained within us, and we are stuck in existing patterns. It’s hard to identify areas that we want to be different in our life, where we want to learn and grow. What if this social distancing could be a trigger? What if we use the gift of time and space to experiment with our lives?

If you have the gift of extra time and space, how do you want to take advantage of it? Consider 4 areas of exploration: Make, Learn, Think, and Connect. I guarantee it’ll be more fun than watching more news!

1. Make

Have there been projects or things you’ve been wanting to create but have never had the time? For many designers, there’s the side-projects we always want to do. Personal projects whether it’s a canvas, a podcast, calligraphy, or an app. Consider all the things that you could make with this time:

  • Arts: painting, drawing, sketching, photography

  • Crafts: knitting, crochet, scrapbooking

  • Cooking & baking

  • Woodworking & carpentry

  • Gardening

One personal side-benefit is that it’s fun to do projects with kids. I tend to be a selfish mom and work on projects that interest me. When they were younger, we worked on collaborative abstract paintings. Right now, they’re particularly enjoying learning to draw Totoro and they would have enjoyed Mo Willems’ classes if they were younger.

2. Learn

What do you want to learn about? Right now many educators are making their resources free with articles covering free Ivy League classes and platforms such as edX and ClassCentral. A quick browse finds some classes I’d love to take:

What else, maybe less high-brow, do you want to learn? Play that ukelele you bought a couple of years ago? Brush up on your high school Spanish skills?

3. Think

When I worked at Facebook, we tried to make time for focus blocks— 3 hour chunks of time to focus, work and get things done. In our rapid days now, we often move between 30-minute chunks of meetings, multi-tasking as we go. How would it feel to have blank chunks of time focused on nothing more than thinking? Could you focus on dreaming what type of life or career you’d like? Some questions I typically ask my clients to think about when we start working together are:

  • What do you want, personally and professionally in your life, that you don’t yet have?

  • What is/are your passion/s in life? What brings you balance, flow, joy, relaxation, etc.?

  • What is a secret passion you don’t think is possible?

  • If time and money were not factors, what would you like to do, be, have?

  • When you think of making a positive contribution to the world, what do you want to offer?

  • At the end of your life, what would you like to celebrate?

  • If you were to do any other job than the one you have now, what would it be?

What else would you like to think about?

  • If you’re running your own business, what products could you dream up?

  • If you’re working for a company, what else could your customers use?

4. Connect

Crisis, especially when communally shared, is a unifying force to bring people together. Since we are practicing social distancing, consider that we now have the gift of apparation, to seemingly bypass the constraints of travel via video conferencing to re-connect with friends or family. Everyone is now home, and likely more available. Who would you like to re-connect with today?

Bottom-Line

Do you have extra time and space in your life with COVID-19? Use this disruption of the status quo to explore something different. Consider what you want to make or learn. Use the time to think, or to connect with people through video-conferencing.

Tutti TaygerlyCreativity, Collaboration