For the past week I have been waking up at whatever time I wake up at and asking myself ‘What do I want to do?’ and as a result this has been my most productive week in a long time. I think I believed that I would feel much better as soon as I moved house but that isn’t what happened. But I realised what I was trying to do was bring the ways of the old world and the old way of being into this new world that has been created for us.

I have mentioned here before that I am well used to working from home. I have been doing it for years now but before, I was able to go out to a café during the day, I was able to go out and meet people in the evenings without worrying about some virus. I am still working from home right now but I am no longer going out to teach classes, I am no longer doing a few hours work in a café. Life has completely changed and I have to change with it.

For the past week as I asked myself what I wanted to do every morning, I was simply thinking about what I wanted to do in the next few minutes or the next hour. I have a to-do list made out but I haven’t put any pressure on myself to have to do any of it but I have still managed to make a fair dent in it without the pressure. The work that I do or how I do it doesn’t always look like it might have before. Sometimes I will be doing some writing at six in the evening while I’m sitting on my bed, sometimes I’ll be reading through class notes by the sea or sometimes, like now, I’ll be in my pyjamas doing some work on the computer first thing in the morning.

When I suddenly understood the value of asking myself that little question every morning I decided that I really wanted to share it with you. We are all scared and worried right now as we come out of lockdown but what I have learnt this past week is that there is no benefit in being hard on ourselves as we process this new way of being. There is no need to presume we can go back to being as productive as we were before, there is no point in making ourselves do things we are no longer comfortable with, and maybe if you take the pressure off a little bit you might find that you can be even more productive! Or maybe not but it’s worth a try finding out anyway, isn’t it?