More COVID musings

In March, my routines were all thwarted by this pandemic. Overnight, quite literally, everything changed and it has truly has taken 6 months for me to re-establish a routine that benefits my wellbeing. My days start around the same time they did when I was commuting to work, but rather than having to deal with traffic, I use the morning for daily movement, podcasts, cat feeding and coffee, not always in that order. I’ve also made a point of not looking at computer or phone screens until after I’ve had a chance to wake up and move. It’s a quiet routine that I’ve found a lot of solace in during the pandemic. The watercooler and coffee machine chats with co-workers have been replaced with chats with neighbors, my husband, and maybe sometimes cats 🙂. In the end, I’m still at work earlier than I would be pre-pandemic. With less time used commuting, I find my mornings to be more enjoyable and less likely to be impacted by external forces like weather, traffic, other commuters, or a delayed Orange line train. I must admit, the lack of commuting also changes the way I look at the impending winter.

The projects and project teams that I’m managing have also gone through changes. We still have the same meetings, but maybe a few more than we had in February. Some of my informal check-ins that were done in hallways commuting between meetings now have been scheduled. We’ve had new members join and some leave us, and it all happened over Zoom! Our project team meetings rarely had all the members in person, as we have team members on both coasts of the US, Israel, and India. Meeting times are often at an inconvenient time for someone, but we do our best. We had been using Zoom from the start, but the use of the video feature only came post-pandemic. It’s always been available, we just never used it. It was fun and novel seeing team members’ faces, some of them for the first time after we’d been working together for over a year.

The added video component really can positively affect how the team communicates. It can provide visual cues during in-depth conversations that would be lost on a conference call. It has also brought additional connectedness into our diverse, international team. However, we’ve learned over time that we probably don’t need to use it for every meeting. There is a fatigue that comes from being on-camera all day, similar but different to the fatigue felt by running around to in-person meetings all day. Personally, I found I was getting a little tired of looking at my own face. It was as if I was carrying a mirror to all meetings. I was very pleased to see the hide self-view feature. 😄 A lot of research is developing regarding this shift to remote work and how to use tools, like Zoom, in a more meaningful way. I recently listened to Seth Godin’s podcast named Zoom Revolution, where he muses for 18 ideas (rants?) on how we can use it better. Please let me know if you give it a listen. I particularly liked his rants on space, timing, and the overall benefits that Zoom could have in our work and personal lives.

My evening routine still suffers from the effects COVID, as most of my hobbies and regularly visited establishments are still out of reach. I’ve replaced some of my social visits with weekly virtual happy hours where we talk work, politics, Netflix shows, family, same as before, just the beverages and the backdrop are BYO. Also, sometimes children pop into our happy hours, which never happened before. I hope you all are holding up okay out there. Please share some of your thoughts about setting routines and the use of Zoom. Stay healthy!