things to think about

[ironymaiden]

my mentor at work turned this article about using the pandemic as a chance to start over into a virtual whiteboard template in order to work through what to keep and what to remove.* so far i'm just populating my quadrants - liked before/liked during, disliked before/disliked during. it's interesting to me that my "disliked before" quadrant is the least populated. not sure if i'm looking at the past with rose-colored glasses or if i had already eliminated a lot of bullshit from my life already.

one thing i hope that i get to keep: the ability to work remotely while traveling. being able to have a long visit with my family but NOT use up my vacation time and have a limited number of hours in the day that i'm required to be socially on is pretty great. *knocks wood* i can afford the plane tickets, so getting rid of the feeling that i could either see my family or do something for myself, resenting most of the trip... it's a game changer.


* he's an extrovert, i've seen his board and it's interesting to see him working through some toxic social and body image stuff, where i'm sad about my filthy house and social video calls.

Comments

[rivendellrose]

I'm envious, honestly, of people who... well, didn't have a toddler through the pandemic. I think a lot about all the new skills I could have picked up, or old skills I could have honed, or books I could have read or written, new directions I could have considered and maybe taken classes in for my career... if I hadn't spent the whole blasted thing with exactly as much free time as I had before it (ie, basically none) due to small child.

I love him, don't get me wrong. But, as I often say to another very good friend who had a kid around the same time, I do wonder sometimes why the hell I did this to myself.

[ironymaiden]

The only thing I did on your list was take classes, _which I had started before the pandemic_. I had all kinds of ambitious thoughts about what to do with the time but mostly I was depressed... unable to read anything challenging or do creative work.

[varina8]

Oddly enough, I came to love my social video calls, especially with friends overseas and across the country. I feel like, with one exception, the calls created more intimacy.

[ironymaiden]

I might feel differently if I didn't spend several hours a week doing video calls for work. Turning the camera on and dealing with overlapping audio and everyone's technical difficulties in my free time is the enemy of joy.

[varina8]

Yes, I think not having to deal with work or school calls is the key. When I did do calls, it was purely social.

[flexagon]

I did exactly that matrix from exactly that article! Here's the stuff I liked from the pandemic:

Spending enough time at home
More sleep, easier mornings
More stuff being virtual: especially tele-health, online flexibility classes, online/virtual poly discussion club
Egalitarian all-remote work meetings
Better home gym
Audiobooks sometimes

I really hope tele-health is here to stay. My improved home gym definitely is!

[ironymaiden]

man, i am not looking forward to the return of hybrid meetings. i agree that it's better when it's all-remote or no-remote.

[yourlibrarian]

Yours is the second post I've seen linking to this article today! And weirdly I could have sworn I'd linked to it myself at some point because I've read it before but if I did I can't find any reference to it.

It's a useful consideration at this time because so many people's lives have either gone through an upheaval or else we've been forced to think more specifically about how and why we do things because our patterns have been disrupted. I've seen more articles focusing on cultural and business changes because, of course, so many want to know what changes are coming and how to best plan for them. But the slow return to work for many has also suggested people are indeed considering what they want to have in their lives going forward.

[ironymaiden]

I think you might have? I don't think i was ready for it at the time it was published.

[reblogarythm]

yoink

[ivy]

"Disliked before" would be hard for me to populate also, simply because of pandemic time dilation and the intensity of the experience. So many of my problems before that just kinda become "whatEVER", and I can't remember why I even cared. Others I am sure I just straight up forgot. It had to be major to make it through that pressure cooker winnower of memories.