How to bring structure to unstructured Covid days
Since March I’ve been thrown into all kinds of Covid havoc. All the things we used to say such as you are not the product of your productivity or your identity is not your job might have worked at one time—like when I had a job, before the pandemic lay waste to my routine. People who still have a routine or are kept busy with Zoom meetings seem to have no idea of how it feels to flounder, to be unmoored without time structure.
It was a big reason by I simply took off at the end of May when things opened up to do my cross-country bike trip to Seaside, OR.
On my bike ride I experienced structure—albeit one I had no control over. I never knew what the day’s weather or roads might bring. You can have a map, but that only goes so far in telling us how the journey will transpire. I’d awake everyday before dawn and as a sliver of yolk was breaking on the horizon was ready to set out. I’d eat and rest as needed (or not, again as the road allowed). By evening I was READY to stop. I’d shower or at least clean up, set up my tent, cook over my tuna fish can stove, eat and drink the last dregs of my tea in the open door of my tent, observing the sky soften into a dusty dusk. I’d read for awhile until sleep overcame me.
But, every day I knew my job: it was to pedal, to get somewhere.
I reckoned upon returning home, I’d fall back into something. But since being back I’ve been left without work. I need an identity, I need to feel needed. I miss the routine and structure of a normal day.
At the BBC website I read an article about how Germans working remotely have been able to retain their former daily structure—even if working from home. Trust the Germans on structure and habit. It is called Feierabend.
“ ‘Feierabend’ has two meanings,” says Christoph Stengel, a 41-year-old Berliner who works as a software developer at price-comparison website Idealo. “First, it's the moment you stop working for the rest of the day – of course, [it’s] a good feeling then. Second, it's the part of the day between work and going to bed.”
This creates bookends, a beginning and an end, punctuated by rest or breaks.
So one German worker during Covid decided to continue with his daily cycle commute. He’d ride what was his normal routine into the office—and back home, to begin his day. At the final press of his computer key, at quitting time, he’d do the same thing: commute there and back, to create physical borders in order to mentally detach. This in fact helps a person to engage and then disengage from the task; it is their defacto on and off switch.
Almost always I transition before dinner by either running
on the Lakefront path or riding my bike. This one One ONE thing has been my
anchor in an otherwise fluid and boundary-less day, week, season.
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