Home isolation work success plan
So Australia is entering into a COVID lockdown and I have my two young kids home with me full time. That means every weekday I have roles as a Dad, a husband, a primary school teacher, a carer, a lecturer, a researcher, a cleaner, a cook and a grad student supervisor. I get asked to be a dinosaur most days too.
So I think I need a plan to be successful. I thought I’d write down my plan for being successful at work now, so I can read it in a few months time and laugh at myself.
This is will start of mild and get more and more extreme, so be warned.
Keep up the meetings, online
Everyone is doing this. It seems self evident. We have coffee with my research team every morning on Microsoft Teams, I attend when I’m not being the Dad/primary school teacher, and sometimes when I am.
Conversations still aren’t as great as they are face-to-face. One thing I’ve noticed is that listening, I mean really listening, is harder. And I think listening, particularly to my grad students and their concerns, is more important than ever. So something I need to figure out.
Being proactive about online engagement
I hope to get more proactive with the online stuff soon. Conferences, workshops have been cancelled. I’m hoping aspects of them can still go ahead online. In a few months I want to reschedule my R workshops that were canned, and do them interactively online. Some goes for research workshops
Work life balance
Not really sure how this will happen. My wife works too, so my work schedule is currently mornings or afternoons (whatever she isn’t working) + evenings.
Working and being a school teacher is mentally exhausting!
Finding it hard to find time for exercise, so this will have to be integrated into play with the kids.
Work balance
This is more achievable. By work balance I mean doing less of the admin I dislike and more of the research/teaching I do like, like workshops with undergrads, R coding and writing.
What’s been great about the shift online so far is that meetings are being replaced with ‘doing research’. Now I have less meetings with students, but more email requests to look R code (which we share on a server). So I get to dip into their R projects, do a bit of coding, leave some comments and then follow up with a call later.
Hopefully it helps them learn too. I’ll keep my eye on that.
Polyphasic sleep
This is the extreme bit. I’m trying a 2 nap + core sleep schedule, so I can work into the evenings.