Coming out of the COVID Pandemic: Round 1

​Hi folks! The pandemic disruptions put Social Sector Titan posts on hold for a while. The Pandemic changed our family’s work and life structure. I took that disruption as an opportunity to step back from regular posting and adjust to the new way of working and living in the Pandemic era. 
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The pandemic story continues. The virus lives on in different forms and we who lived through that time period survive and move on to the next parts of our lives. I’m documenting and sharing my personal experience to gain mental clarity on last year, and connect with others who might have good ideas about the experience. We also may need to move back into lockdown mode if the virus variants gain force. We will all then need to re-use some of that hard won learning for a second round of the COVID battle. 

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Our pandemic story
At the outset of the pandemic lockdown in March 2020, we had to come up with a new way of working and living that allowed my partner Kirsten to continue her work as a professor, me to continue my work in international disaster response, and our kids now ages 6 and 10 to remote school.

We worked out the best system we could construct at the time, and I detailed that on this blog post on the site. This current post looks back at the pandemic lockdown year and shares my experience in applying mindsets, strategies and tactics. This is not best practice. Rather, it is a brief account of what we tried as a family, what I struggled with, and a record of what took place during those lockdown months. Some of these experimental approaches worked well. Others didn’t help at all and we had to come up with new approaches that were often painful and unsatisfactory. I wouldn’t claim that I or anyone else could have the best approach in a situation like this. But if we all share our stories it helps with the understanding and the moving on. 

Gender Dimensions of the COVID year
The pandemic in the United States impacted men, women, boys, and girls differently. The heightened negative impact on women during the pandemic is clear. The additional duties of planning, housework, childcare and homeschooling fell disproportionately to women, with enough women leaving the workforce to put us back to the 1980s in female workforce representation. As an unmarried partnership, Kristen and I have developed what I perceived as an equal division of labor related to the household. As two working professionals, we both contribute time, money and love to our household. However, even in our egalitarian setup, the nature of the Pandemic placed additional burdens on Kirsten. Although we tried repeatedly to divide up the remote school support burden for our children, she took on the majority of the responsibility and time commitment. This additional mental load placed a massive amount of stress on her that made it necessary to dial back her work commitments and salary for that time period. Even in a highly educated egalitarian household like ours, additional load fell to her.

The psychological load of normal life + crisis
Routine life in the United States already creates an administrative and psychological burden. Routine tasks around food (breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack for the kids and adults) shelter (rent or home ownership, maintenance, grounds keeping, utility bills, household items), work (both parents working demanding professional jobs, kids in school with homework), extra curricular activities (renewal activities for the parents, kids lessons, sports and travel) all require significant anticipation, monitoring, and logistical orchestration. Actually doing the items listed above, such as making the food or dropping off the kids at Scouts, requires a long back-end of anticipation and preparation with the actual action as the last simple step. This anticipatory load fell more to women before the pandemic. The pandemic added to the complexity of the anticipation and increased the time required to complete the final action by requiring constant focus on remote school management during the day. 

Same pandemic, widely different outcomes
The pandemic was an accelerator and a differentiator. We all lived through the same COVID pandemic but the impacts were vastly different for different groups, and for individuals within those groups. The widespread job losses for in-person professions were devastating. Those of us with remote work compatible setups, and money in the markets, often prospered and accelerated our work and wealth even as others suffered and fell behind. 

The upside of the pandemic
The personal loss of so many of our fellow Americans and humans around the world can’t be expressed in these words. I salute and mourn for them. But there are also undeniable upsides from the COVID pandemic. 

Remote work became normalized. Those of us working mostly remotely for the years preceding the pandemic were in a stigmatized minority. The pandemic pushed our approaches and techniques into the mainstream. This radical change demonstrated that most of what we thought needed to happen in person can be distributed across space and time. Once all of us were forced into a remote setup, power dynamics changed for the better. Ideas, quality, and work started to overshadow position, prestige and location in the building. All of us became equal on the video call in a new way.  Managers who had been reluctant to allow remote work were forced to see that in many ways, it was successful.

The pandemic provided lots of practice for me to learn how to refocus after a disruption. Repetitions and constant interruptions of focus forced me to improve at refocusing after the inevitable disruptions that happened with four people constantly in the household. I hope the upsides of the pandemic continue and I’m baking them into my routine for the long haul. 

Wrap up of Mindsets
The pandemic took a toll on our family’s mental health. Each person in our family reacted differently to the fear and uncertainty and routine changes. The complexity of the way the external stressors enter the mind and create emotions and actions seems unfathomably complex and at times random. Each of us was understanding the shifting reality around us in our own way, and consciously and unconsciously changing the way we worked and lived as a result of those new forces. Some of us emerged unscathed for now, others are exhibiting mood shifts and are still in emotional and mental pain probably as a result of the Pandemic. 

The mental health hit was real and severe. We mitigated this by using our learning from previous disasters in other countries to absorb and adapt to the conditions of the new way of living during the pandemic. 

Our family’s mindsets were to take the pandemic seriously, and also to look for the Antifragile opportunity in this crisis. This means that we were looking for ways that this crisis could provide some kind of advantage to ourselves as individuals, as a family, as a community and as a global people. Emergencies provide a shake up to the way things were before. They cause a resorting, a restructuring of things that we wrongfully thought were fixed and unchangeable. Being ready to move within that disruption and even trying  to enjoy aspects of it, positions you in the best possible state of mind to make the right choice, and to interpret events in an advantageous way. Specifically for our family this meant using the time bonus that we reaped from our previously long commute for something useful, and redirecting money that we spent on travel toward local adventures and additional savings. 

Taking the pandemic seriously meant learning as much as we could about the disease, and doing everything in our power to take active steps to reduce our family and community’s risk of contracting the disease, while improving our chances of surviving the disease if we became infected. For us this meant creating a written plan for a wide range of scenarios, stocking food and cleaning supplies in the beginning of the lockdowns and maintaining curiosity about how our own reactions, those of our community, nation, and world evolved throughout the Pandemic. 

Wrap up of Strategies 
Here is a summary of the strategies we used during the lockdown:

Writing out the day -  We had two parents remote working and two kids aged 5 and 9 doing remote school. Each person in the household had a different and intricate schedule from school and work. We wrote out a two column hour-by-hour breakdown of each day with studying, class calls, reading, meals, and time outside. We had no choice but to double down on this routine and play out the sequence of simultaneous work and school. 

Catering for one long party - Stocking groceries and cooking three meals and two snacks per day is an involved task. The dishwasher sometimes had three runs in a day, and the adults traded off cooking meals. The amount of extra mental planning work, physical preparation, and clean up was a big surprise since that work was broken into smaller chunks and spurts in the pre-pandemic routine. 

Integrating work, life and chronic interruption in a new approach  - Batching, the pomodoro technique and other high performance habits are essential to a productive workflow. Those luxuries disappear quickly in a pandemic lockdown when adults divide the day into work, food preparation,  and school management time. The adults lived in a state of near constant interruption from additional planning, food preparation and school management. 

Getting help - It's not always easy to ask for help. I had to ask for help in new ways. Help from the teachers and my partner in how to manage the school. Help from friends through more phone conversations to keep spirits up, help from nearby family members for child care and support, and help from a therapist to proactively work through the pandemic load. Help looked different for each of us, and we had to ask for and accept help in new and unexpected ways. 

The COVID POD - Like many people, we connected with a family with similar aged kids & adults to create a covid pod. We made efforts to be together in the same location and agreed on protocols like avoiding contact with other families and ways we could manage to stay safe.

Keeping going & acceptance of the suboptimal - I’m an optimizer and strive for  high performance. In the case of a family lockdown, I had to accept suboptimal things like the kids being on the screen more than I would have liked, stopping all work travel, and eliminating all but local recreational travel. 

Wrap up of Tactics
Here are a few tactics that helped us during the Pandemic when we were using our house for work, school and recreation: 

House of many functions - Our house became a multifunctional office, catering center, school, recharge space, gym. All these things simultaneously.. This meant separating and compartmentalizing spaces physically and mentally to make them as useful as possible for the required activities. The bedroom became a school workspace, the kitchen was a planning center, as well as an additional workspace and school location. The outdoors became a gym and play space, and overflow location for work calls. 

Alternating outside with inside time - Cycling through the inside and outside locations helped break up the use of the physical space, and helped transition from one space-use case to another. Going outside and biking around with the kids after a call in the kitchen, made it easier for me to come back into the kitchen and cook the next meal. 

Making space for solo recharge - The tactic of getting private physical and mental space to recover and recharge ourselves became paramount as the lockdown progressed. Physical training like running and biking was my primary recharge method. We tried to create space for  the kids to play alone, away from us when they needed it. 

Making it work for you
​No matter how good your mindsets, tactics and strategies are, the impact of a global disaster is hard and real. We are still recovering from the negative impacts. We are trying to sustain and prolong the positive aspects of the shake-up. Understanding the characteristics of the disaster and how it will affect you, your family and your livelihood is a first step toward thriving in the storm. But there is no playbook for this, only a positive learning progression that we can all take, and try to help each other along the way. I’m sharing these takeaways to summarize our process and learning and share the ideas with others who also experienced the pandemic. I”m looking forward to hearing from you on your mindsets, strategies and tactics. Let me know!

Happy Trails,

Mark