I’m David Knott. I’ve been working in enterprise technology for over forty years and I’m still learning. This blog is based on mistakes, failures, lessons and some things I find interesting:
Relearning the habit of focus
Just last week, I wrote that the upcoming Christmas holiday in the UK, with many remaining restrictions on what we could do and where we could go, was an opportunity to reinforce or acquire habits of work/life balance, after many months of working from home.
What I didn’t expect was that, with new variants of the virus circulating, restrictions would become even greater.. The Christmas holiday, which already often contains long stretches of unstructured time - particularly that fuzzy period between Christmas Day and New Year - would be even more unscheduled and unstructured, as even our limited plans would have to be cancelled.
Is there any silver lining to be found in the next phase of our evolving situation? If there is, I think it is in the opportunity to relearn the habit of focus: to spend dedicated time on one thing, to the extent that we lose ourselves in it.
Maintaining work/life balance in an unusual holiday season
For many people, the next day or so will be their last working day of 2020 before taking a break over Christmas and the end of the year.
Like so much in 2020, though, that break will not be like other years. Where I live, in the UK, there are still restrictions on travel, hospitality and social interaction, and while some of these rules will be relaxed briefly over Christmas, we will still need to exercise caution.
How should we spend our holiday time, then, when we can’t do much of what we would normally do?
Let’s (not) do the time warp again
How long has 2020 been for you? How long was the last week? Or the last month? Or the last hour?
If your experience has been anything like mine, none of our experience of time has felt anything like normal this year. Hours have dragged until days felt like weeks - while weeks and months have flown by like minutes and seconds. It simultaneously feels impossible that it is already December, and impossible that March 2020 was only nine months ago.
A recently published research paper based on the UK showed that 80% of survey respondents reporting experiencing distorted time during lockdown, and found that experience of distortion correlated with factors such as stress, insecurity and continuity and complexity of work. I am sure that further research into this phenomenon will follow, and that one of the small silver linings of this tragic year will be an improved understanding of this dimension of human experience and perception.
Thankful for new perspective
One of the many privileges I have had in my career is to work with people from all over the world, to learn about and take part in their traditions. This week, now that I am part of a team which is mostly based in the USA, I got to celebrate Thanksgiving in a small way: at our regular team meeting, we took the time to share the things that we were thankful for.
Naturally, everyone in the team was thankful that they and their families were healthy, and that, despite these strange times, they were employed and got to do interesting work in a great company. The thought that inspired me most, though, came from a colleague who said that she was thankful for the opportunity to choose who we are going to be as we come out of this crisis.
Finding wisdom in unexpected places
In strange and uncertain times, it helps to find wisdom, whatever the source.
I don’t mind admitting that, even though I am privileged to be healthy, housed and in work, I find it challenging to work in a world where we can’t meet each other in person, where I sit in the same room every day, and those days blur into a seamless stream.
In theory, as I no longer have to take the time to travel home on a train (or even a plane), I should end each day with the extra energy to put that lockdown time to productive use. In practice, I find that, most evenings, I don’t have the energy to do much more than watch TV. I suspect that I am not alone.