I prefer going gym early morning daily and while the gym has an odd fifty people that could be seen at 5am, I could hardly see five, the receptionist there says that’s because of the corona fear no one wants to come and when I am about to lift up a dumbbell , the situation scares me more. What if someone would have lifted the same and might be affected or what if people who are not coming might be quarantined.
Traffic on roads is not even a quarter of what it used to be , while it took me over twenty minutes to cover a distance of eight miles now it takes only five. Schools, colleges and government departments are shutdown for a few weeks, not all the private companies though.
There’s one thing that this deadly disease is making people learn, how to tackle fear. You switch on any TV channel in India, it might be 2 pm in the afternoon or 1 am in the night, every where the news is about corona virus, as if the world’s largest democracy has come to a stand stiff. Is there nothing happening in India apart form this ? All I know by now is all they want is a consumer’s attention to boost their viewership by the business of fear.
Coming down to our daily life, both me and my wife are IT folks, so would be most of the married young population here. She works for an MNC based out of Noida and I work for an Indian Corp. While she is enjoying her work from home and gets a lot of time to finish her daily household chores, I step out for office relatively early. For her, work from home culture is good for a while but that does not keeps you disciplined. She says she’s enjoying it temporarily but as someone who is responsible to manage a team, working from home doesn’t fits in the bill.
Calling it the best work from home strategy during this pandemic so far, She locker herself up in a room with her laptop, a study table and chair away from the distractions but that works out to be too de-motivating most of the times. When you are home you always want to be at ease and that’s what we have been doing always.
Advanced collaboration tools to work from home are coming in picture, while we expect the culture to be easy and the office tasks to be divided into a day’s span rather than those fixed 9 hours to login, people around us into the same scenario are finding it suffocating and so are we. With new tools, the way work is done and hour long discussion calls, all employees are expected to increase their productivity manifold.
Summing it down, both of us are taking this challenge as a mental strengthening exercise. We try to stay away from social media, while we have more time at home we prefer spending it more on cooking at home always and healthy eating, while trying to adjust to the new work culture, which surely needs to be worked upon to not drain out the employees.