Lockdown time
There is a great deal of pressure to accomplish things while we are at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it has been easy for me to think of it in a few different ways. At times, when trying to get my kids to do their schoolwork, it seemed impossible, and if you’re someone that works from home and has kids, it’s been exceptionally challenging to get any other big projects out of the way. However, now that school is out, it’s a great opportunity to recalibrate our schedules. Because performance training and physical therapy tend not to lend themselves to appropriate social distancing, I’ve had a lot of free time that I would otherwise have spent working. One way I have taken advantage of that is to make a schedule of ‘enrichment’ activities that I want to do, as well as a goal for how long I would like to spend doing them, and then record all of the time I spent in focused practice each day. I can monitor over the course of the week how I am doing, and mentally plan what the next couple of days will need to look like in order to meet my goals (will I get two hours of grappling in with the training partner I selected to be my quarantine buddy? Will I be able to practice the piano without disturbing my kids?).
At the end of the week, I total everything up and see how I did. If I did less than I wanted to, I might adjust my goal up a bit for the following week. If I did more, I might adjust it down, taking some pressure off for the next week as a reward, or I might increase it, based on the realization that my previous goal could be more ambitious. What I don’t do however, is beat myself up if I miss a goal. The time for that has passed once you’re adding the minutes up in the TOTAL column. During the week is your time to be critical, when you still have the opportunity to correct course if you are falling behind.
Getting Set Up
When figuring out what I wanted to do, I made a list of a lot of the activities I had been doing when I was working, before I had kids, and started thinking about how I wanted to return to them. I have sung and played guitar for almost twenty years, but not as much as I once did (like many things, I now understand when I hear people tell me that they stopped doing “X” activity when they had kids). So those were on the list. I thought about how much I had to do to improve when I first started, and used that as my baseline target. My gym closed. I am fortunate enough to have a pullup bar and kettlebells at home. Not as heavy as I use at the gym, so part of my compensation for this was upping the volume from my normal full body program of 2-3 days/week to 4 days/week. My martial arts school is closed. I spent 9 hours/week training Muay Thai, Grappling, and Kali there. Put those on the list. Finally, I decided I wanted to learn the piano. 30 minutes/day sounded like something a teacher would have told me to do, so I bought a book (later, a smartphone app) to help with that and made 210 minutes my goal each week. I have since adjusted those goals to better reflect what I am capable of, but wanted to start with something that I thought was both appropriate and achievable.
I know that everyone’s days are different. Family, work and home responsibilities are still there in some form or another (or not…my wife took our kids to visit family this past weekend, and magically the 4-5 hours/day I spent on my activities took 4-5 hours, instead of from 8 in the morning until 10 at night). The amount of time set aside might be too much for many people, especially if they don’t have hobbies/enrichment activities that lend themselves to home study. It requires adaptation. It’s different training martial arts only via heavy bag work, shadowboxing, and video study. It’s not ideal. But almost every skill, hobby or task has multiple elements that can be done at home with reduced resources. Pick a few things that are important to you. Or better yet, things that you think could become important to you. Things you want to learn, books you want to read, people you want to connect with, stories you want to write, meals you want to cook, lessons you want to teach, furniture you want to fix, sports you want to play, rooms you want to paint, gardens you want to plant. Set a simple, achievable target for how much time you want to spend doing those things--maybe just 30 minutes a week--and put it on a schedule like the one below. Then start filling in the boxes. Just like with your weekly schedule, the time to be critical of yourself is when you still have the opportunity to take action. Not when our community has returned to a sense of normalcy and you’re wishing you could get back just a little bit of that quarantine time!