How I Managed To Keep It Together During The Lockdown

This image is an accurate reflection of my state of mind in the last couple of weeks. If the stage four lockdown in Melbourne wasn’t enough for the disruption of my mental well being — my work progressively kept getting worse, leaving me completely drained and acutely irritable. Even the anticipation of the weekends made me worried and anxious as the backlog of unfinished tasks began eating away into my weekends.

I began losing my calm at the drop of a hat. This is what stress must feel like.

I felt myself slipping away, almost on a brink of collapse. Even intermittent days off at work didn’t invigorate me and I still found myself falling behind on everything. Nights were sleepless and my days were like an energy sucking vampire.

I know that most of us at this point are trying to stay collected and are finding creative ways to keep our energy levels high. It is exhausting. And people with children, I salute you.

I needed to get my act together for my own sake and for the sake of my poor husband who often had to bear the brunt of my unpredictable temper.

Enough was enough, I had to brood upon the things that were really bothering me to see if I could do anything to alter it so I could lift up my spirits and not be held hostage to my own disposition.

I locked in one Saturday afternoon to do just this.

Problem 1 — Physical space

Sure, my apartment was small but I was still surviving, in fact, thriving living in it. Up to this point that is. I was sporadically bothered by the confined one bedroom space my husband and I were living in but it never occurred to me that this arrangement could be changed — we had acclimatised to concept of working from home (of course we did, we were six months into the pandemic at this stage) but in a ‘not so ergonomic’ work set-up. The lack of physical space was really getting to my subconscious now and I was completely oblivious to it — I found myself snapping, jeering and taunting at people or situations without knowing why I resorting to this behaviour?

I followed my ‘5 Why’ approach and realised that it was all connected to the lack of physical space, my physical space.

Solution 1 — Move into a bigger apartment

Once I used the laddering approach to get to the bottom of this problem, the solution surfaced pretty quickly. But how could we even inspect any property at this point — could I potentially wait for the next couple of weeks before the lockdown restrictions for property inspection were purported to be lifted. Probably not.

And then it struck me.

Why not move into a bigger apartment in the same building which we could inspect without a property agent. Brilliant. And my husband seemed totally on-board.

I got in touch with my agent, turns out there were two lovely apartments available in our building that suited our needs — one, in fact, was literally next door.

We swiftly decided to go with the apartment next door and the deal was sealed in the next two days. Although, the place is expensive given the real estate rates have plunged but that did not faze us one bit. We are now moving into the new apartment in the next two weeks. Just this thought fills me with great joy, I am euphoric and can hardly contain my excitement. The countdown is on…

Problem 2 — Routine Monotony

Every day felt like Groundhog Day. It was sickening. The matrix felt more real than ever. Rise, exercise, shower, coffee, work and then rinse, repeat — EVERY single day. I was beginning to run out of informal conversations with colleagues as everything felt stale and unnecessary. Though my husband and I did try to have a little fun on Fridays by making cocktails and we did have some success with Pina Colada, Margaritas, Mulled Wine to name a few but ‘one’ fun thing during a week wasn’t good enough.

Solution 2 — Mixing it up

One fine day I got up later than usual with little time to exercise in the morning. As I powered through my morning calls, I promised myself that I would pick up my exercise later in the afternoon. My workout routines comprises of High-intensity interval training (HIIT). When I saw an hour long slot free in my calendar, I jumped right in. The HIIT felt like a breeze! I followed this by a cold shower. And just like that my day felt so much better.

I realised that instead of being hunched over my laptop all day long, I needed to mix thing up. I needed to distribute non-work activities unevenly throughout my day, without upsetting my calendar, so I’d look forward to some novelty in my day — so it was really wedging ‘fun’ things in that I could look forward to in my day.

I experimented scattering activities like workouts, showers, grabbing coffee from the nearest cafe, short walks in the park carefully so it would keep my days interesting. Initially, I was a bit apprehensive as I thought the uneven spread of activities would disrupt my work and make me lag behind but I was astonished to notice that it, in fact, refreshed me and made me more efficient towards carrying out my work.

And it has been working out beautifully so far.

Problem 3 — Context switching

Like most people, I am not good at context switching. If I am involved in one task, I find shifting my focus to a completely different and unrelated task incredibly difficult. For the last couple of months, I have been working on two different projects and within these several sub-projects.

Project 1–3x sub projects

Project 2–2x sub projects

My brain was physically refusing to retain this information and was failing me as it was constantly obsessing over one sub-project when working on the other while also worrying about the immediate meeting ahead, it was difficult to get anything done. My productivity was sharply declining as I was lost in the pandemonium of each day. It was impossible to focus in the flurry of constant emails, Teams pings and notifications from social platforms.

I was crossing off each day on the calendar, eagerly waiting for this waterboarding to end.

Solution 3 — Timeboxing

Whoever invented timeboxing was a genius. I accidently used this concept first when I was behind on some tasks and had a meeting right ahead — I forced myself to keep working without getting distracted in order to not have egg on my face in the meeting. I set a timer for thirty minutes and decided to not do anything but just focus on the task at hand. I guess it was probably because I thought the alarm could go off any moment and I felt like I was being watched — I resisted the urge to check out emails and didn’t even glance over my Teams that seemed to be exploding with notifications. By the time the alarm went off, I had not only accomplished the task but even gone ahead and finished a few extra ones. I was astounded by how focused and undistracted I was during this time. I hadn’t worried about the other sub projects even for a second.

The meeting was phenomenal.

I decided to timebox all my tasks moving forward — hell, I even went ahead and started setting aside time to worry and fret (I had long read about this but had doubted its efficacy). It worked like magic. I found my productivity suddenly skyrocketed. I could cut down time spent on work by a whopping two hours on an average by tackling tasks through timeboxing. It was truly staggering.

Well, while this really helped me keep myself together, I’d be lying if I told you that I am suddenly back to being an energy reservoir. I still have good and bad energy days but I’ve found myself, more often than not, in a joyful state with perceptibly less irritability.

It’s okay to give yourself the freedom to feel both negative and positive emotions as long as your loved ones aren’t at the receiving end.

Until then…

Originally published at https://neeti21bisht.wixsite.com on September 27, 2020.