If you’ve read my earlier posts on Coronavirus in Japan, you may recall that cases here have progressed more slowly than in the States, and there haven’t been nearly as many. Schools have been almost entirely closed since early March, and they’re slated to stay closed until the end of May at least. In Toyama, most businesses are still open, albeit with limited hours and fewer customers, and most people seem to be practicing safe social distancing, mask-wearing, and hand sanitizing.
I too have been working from home since early April, and have started to understand what my friends and family back home are dealing with. Not leaving your house…kind of sucks, especially when your house is a three-room apartment and you spend most of your day sitting on a tatami mat floor.
I’ve had my good days and my bad days during this whole thing—on my good days I feel lucky to have so much more time to focus on my writing and creative projects, which I’ve made a LOT of headway on over the past month. Other days, though, I find myself feeling distracted and claustrophobic, jumping at my phone every few minutes and then beating myself up for not getting enough done. When this happens I try to recognize the problem, step back, pull out a good book or movie, and separate myself from work for a while until I feel motivated again, which is a lot more effective than trying to work through the suck.
What bothers me the most, though, is not only a state of uncertainty about the future (how long before I have to go back to work, whether I’ll be able to visit the States in August, etc.), but simply not having things like weekend trips, my weekly tennis club, nights out with friends, and special events to look forward to. Until now I hadn’t realized how much upcoming plans gave my life a sense of purpose and excitement—but now that those plans are all cancelled, it feels like there’s a big gaping void looming into my future, and I don’t know when it’ll end.
That doesn’t exactly make for the ideal working mentality, does it?
COVID-19 Stay-at-Home Schedule
In the midst of all this I’ve been trying to figure out a work schedule that balances both my Day Job responsibilities and my creative work while not causing burnout from too much time in front of the computer. Right now that schedule looks something like this:
- ~8:30am – Wake up
- ~8:30~9:30am – Get ready, send necessary text messages
- ~9:30am – Make Day’s Work Plan
- ~9:35am~12:30pm – Creative Work/Day Job work/Japanese study mix
- ~12:30~2:30pm – Lunch Break: relax, read, take a walk, run errands, etc.
- ~2:30~7:00pm – Creative Work/Day Job work/Japanese study mix
- ~7:00~8:00pm – Dinner
- ~8:00pm~12:15am – Do light work, read, watch videos, or talk to friends, unwind before bed
- Weekends – Mix up light creative/Day Job work with reading, non-distracted writing sessions, video calls, cleaning, etc.
If you notice a lot of tilde marks (~) it’s because my timing has been pretty all over the place depending on the goals and challenges of the day. Let’s break down each stage…
~8:30am – Wake up
While waking up should be easy to pin down, it kind of hasn’t been. When the work-from-home order came I was behind on my sleep and needed a lot of catching up, which led to some early nights and more than a few late mornings. When I finally felt rested again I found that my body naturally wanted to wake up around 8:15 or 8:30 every day, and rather than mess up that rhythm with an alarm, I decided to roll with it.
Ideally this time would be a half hour or so earlier (in my old work-at-home schedule I used to wake up around 8:00 every day), but now that things have stabilized, I’ll take 8:30 or 9:00.
~8:30~9:30am – Get ready, send necessary text messages
My getting ready routine hasn’t changed, but I’ve found it easier to check my texts first thing in the morning and respond if necessary, whereas I used to respond later in the day or in the evening. This is partly because I want to keep in touch with family and friends in my state of increased isolation, but also because I often wake up to Day Job-related texts that could affect the day’s plan. Rather than leave these messages hanging as one more thing to worry about, I prefer to get them off my plate so I can move on to the next thing.
~9:30am – Make Day’s Work Plan
This also hasn’t changed—writing out a daily To-Do List has been an essential part of my work life for almost ten years now, and COVID-19 hasn’t changed that. I still juggle a variety of factors in deciding what to do on a given day, but the difference now is that Day Job work is more heavily a part of the general mix (see below).
~9:35am~12:30pm – Creative Work/Day Job work/Japanese study mix
I work as an Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) in Japanese elementary schools, and with schools closed it’s been a bit of a scramble figuring out what my American coworkers and I should be doing. Japan’s also a bit behind the Western world when it comes to working from home culture and technology, so my coworkers are in a similar boat about how to handle distance-learning for the students.
The solution we arrived at involves making English videos for students to watch at home—which involves a fair amount of coordinating, lesson planning, scriptwriting, and filming. A lot of the planning takes place over Line chat (the instant messenger that’s ridiculously popular in Asia but that most Americans have never heard of), which, unfortunately, means that I’m either constantly reaching for my phone or pulling up the chat windows on my laptop.
This has made it difficult to focus some days when things need to be planned, but I’m trying to work around this. If the chat windows are busy, I try to set aside time to respond to as much Day Job-related work as I need to until things die down. If Day Job communication is relatively quiet I turn my phone volume off, step away for a while, and work on other things—like I’m doing right now by writing this blog post.
~12:30~2:30pm – Lunch Break: relax, read, take a walk, run errands, etc.
Too much screen time was REALLY starting to give me the shakes at the end of the day, as was not going outside, so last week I borrowed a habit from my last work-from-home schedule and started setting aside a midday break. That means more time away from the laptop (and preferably from the phone too), which will hopefully put me in better shape for afternoon work instead of bringing on a four o’clock burnout.
I’d like this break to be as close to two hours as possible, but most days I feel too far behind to give myself that much time. Weather is also a factor—up until this week it’s been cold and rainy, limiting my options for getting outside. Today was a notable exception, before writing this post I rode my bike to a quiet shaded bench I found in the park with my copy of Love in the Time of Cholera and just read for forty-five minutes—and I definitely feel better now.
My favorite reading spot in the park, off the beaten path and free of people!
~2:30~7:00pm – Creative Work/Day Job work/Japanese study mix
The afternoon is usually just a repeat of the morning, though with any luck the Line chats will be quieter and I can focus more on creative work instead of Day Job work. My Japanese coworkers also tend to be more active in the morning as they make their own plans for the day, which means they too are more likely to be quiet after lunch. Hurray for uninterrupted work time!
~7:00~8:00pm – Dinner
I try to keep dinner time as chill time—I put on a podcast, cook (or microwave) something, and afterwards spend some time zoning out. I also tend to respond to more text messages that have built up during the day and allow myself some social media time. Unfortunately, though, my increased isolation has led to my wanting more interaction in the cyber-world, so I’m not always good about keeping my social media limits—which I’m once again trying to work on.
~8:00pm~12:15am – Do light work, read, watch videos, and talk to friends, unwind before bed
I try to keep my nights as free as possible, since they serve as important down time that prepares me for the next day. On nights when I work too late I wake up restless and wanting to sleep in, which then throws off the next day’s schedule. This is especially dangerous on nights when I’m behind on my daily plan and have to force myself to step away, because by trying to do too much I not only lose time the next day, I also feel shitty.
When I do productive things in the evening I try to keep them low-intensity—last week I fixed the zipper on my backpack, and last night I read some submissions for the latest issue of the Charleston Anvil, a lit zine run by my friend Randall that he asked me to help with. Other nights I just read, pull out a movie, or watch Bob Ross paint a landscape—I try to mix things up.
Weekends – Mix up light creative/Day Job work with reading, non-distracted writing sessions, video calls, cleaning, etc.
Weekends are a grab bag—and I’d like to keep them that way. Because my moods have been up and down, some weekends I don’t feel like working at all and need to step away; other times I want to stay productive, but only on low-stakes things like cleaning my bathroom or paying bills. Other days I wake up desperate to withdraw and write for a few hours, and still other days I schedule too many video calls that take up half the day—and I’m fine with that.
However I end up spending the time, I’m trying to leave Saturdays and Sundays as unregimented as possible so I can get back to work on Monday with more focus.
How Well is This All Working????
Not as well as I’d like, but WAAAAAAAAAAAAY better than no schedule at all.
Time will tell of course, and again, a LOT depends on the challenges of each individual day—this morning I spent two straight hours settling some work problems, then worked on the blog for an hour while only responding to Line messages occasionally. Yesterday we filmed some movies in the afternoon, so I set aside an undistracted hour for writing in the morning, then answered a backlog of emails before taking an early lunch. And last Wednesday was a Japanese holiday, so after sleeping later than I’d planned (d’oh!) I settled in for four undistracted hours of writing knowing that the chats would be quiet.
I’ve found that keeping a super-strict schedule is less important than keeping a general rhythm of priorities and consistency, especially when you have to self-motivate rather than relying on an external routine. If nothing else, the Coronavirus pandemic has been helping me hone my work habits, and I hope a lot of you out there are doing the same :-)