After one week

Lots of things I could be writing about from March, but let’s be honest the lockdown of Britain is the thing in everyone’s head right now. It’s one week into the formal lockdown (announced Monday 23rd March). How are things going? I’m going to try and write something each week during this period to capture how I’m feeling through the lockdown. One day I hope to look back and this will help me remember what is a very strange time.

I’ve actually been working from home for two weeks now. I’m in my home city rather than London, which is a big plus. Work is very full-on at the moment, resulting in some very overworked people and some heroics to keep things going forward. It’s stressful, but interesting work and I’ve enjoyed going through a whole variety of roles from high-level strategic lead, to technical delivery manager, to technical architect. I even wrote some code the other day. It’s a thought for another day, but it has given me a series of windows into different futures - at some point I need to process this and work out what I actually want to be doing with myself.

One of the perils of home working is letting your job consume you and that is certainly happening to me. To an extent, I’m ok with this as it’s keeping me busy while I can’t go outside and I’m doing important and urgent work. On the other hand, working 12 hour days 11 of the last 13 days isn’t going to do me any favours. Fortunately, I’m in a position to at least try to bring some order to the chaos so maybe I can help out.

Outside of work? Well, there isn’t much outside at the moment. I’m getting my government allowed walk each day, usually around dusk. The town and parks are very quiet as you’d expect. I’m eating fine, although not really doing enough exercise. The biggest problem is the isolation. I live alone so all human contact is now over the phone, which is a weird experience. It means that I’m timing my walks for dusk so I can see the bats and talk to them. Bats are great at social distancing.

Joking aside, I am a bit concerned about going a bit strange when life is mostly work and sleep, with some phone calls in between. I’m trying to meet people digitally, but with the late working I’m finding that quite hard to do. It seems most people want to gather early in the evening and that isn’t working for me. I’m also concerned with the amount of time I’m spending staring at screens. I try to avoid it normally, but now I’m intensely staring at a laptop through most of the day then stepping away only to fire up a desktop for the evening. Hmm.

More soon.

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This post is from a series of shorter posts, written roughly once a week while the country is on lockdown to capture my feelings and reactions as we go. They are all tagged with coronavirus.