That's no moon. It's a space station. -Obi-wan Kenobi
OK so you're about 14 days into your involuntary mobile worklife. If you're lucky, you've created a reasonably sound, functional work routine, connected with your staff, colleagues, bosses and friends, upgraded your at-home tech footprint, and found some continuity in terms of your own productivity. You have a strong sense of what to do when you start your day, a predictable re-entry plan for the end, and in between - well, you're figuring it out.
Moreover, if you're like me, you're also grappling with the likely long-term reality of your kids on some distance learning platforms (mine are learning on BlueJeans, SplashMath, Duolingo, and Google Docs), a spouse or partner at home with you (my wife, a law partner, is working from an adjacent space), and your usually calm pets confined with the family, absorbing the stress in the house, feeling needy, and reacting to new family routines.
So overnight, what had been my productive mobile worklife has become a mashed up home-office-law-firm-elementary-school-pet-daycare-gym-restaurant-motel-Frankenstein-variety show. I don't think there is any advice one could give that would sufficiently address how genuinely unique and disruptive this time has been. The collective mental health of all workers - white collar, blue collar, no collar, dog collar - is undeniably trending downward. Even pre-planned mobile work transitions carry psychological pitfalls: Challenges with establishing a routine, connectivity with colleagues, and feeling isolated can create baggage enough. Each carries deeply individualized psychological impact. In the most controlled cases, mitigation is relatively easy - intentional connectivity, exercise, routine, sleep. COVID-19's forced march into mobile workland puts these feelings on steroids.
Still, it's important to maintain healthy habits in the face of "all this". Continue your routines, continue finding time to exercise, connect with your colleagues and family, assess and reassess your own needs relative to your workspace, and most importantly: find a way to unplug. You might find it helpful to write these things down, print them and put them on a wall, dribble them across a whiteboard in your home office. But however you remind yourself of the need to keep your sh!t together, you need to do it. Because without the basic structure and discipline you established in Week I, you're in for a rough ride.
But with all that said, my advice for Week II is simple: Acknowledge. Acknowledge that this is hard. Acknowledge that this is unprecedented. Acknowledge that there will be times when you're frayed and messed up and incapable of being the calm professional presence you usually are. Acknowledge that there are existential concerns with your livelihood, company, family, friends and community that are truly without precedent. Acknowledge that COVID is for now a "new normal", involuntary and unfortunate. Acknowledge that we've come upon our own version of the Death Star, something that appeared initially to be as benign as a small moon but ended up being one of the most destructive forces in the galaxy.
And like the Rebel Alliance, that anxiety you're feeling right now is totally normal. And if there were ever a moment in history to acknowledge the genuinely screwed up period we're in right now and cut yourself some slack, that time is now.
