I’ve been working from home from the first week of March. By now that sums up to around six weeks. The first couple of weeks work was calmer, in my experience, with less meetings and things cancelled. Everything was a bit chaotic there the first weeks. Two conferences where I was going to talk as key note were cancelled which gave me several empty days on a short notice. Also other things disappeared from the calendar and many things were cancelled. But the last weeks it has been more or less the same amount of “too much to do” as usual. But with a different flavour and content.
For me distance meetings takes much more energy than ordinary meetings where everyone is in the same room. Often I have had 5-7 hours of meetings in a day and it doesn’ really work well. Also, very often I am the meeting leader and meetings have a different character than usual. Perhaps that takes some energy from me too? One example is that people are muted and the meetings become a bit more organised. They also need to be more carefully planned. For the future I need to cut down on the number of meetings per day to be able to have energy enough for the other parts of my work: planning things, writing funding applications and papers and reading. The following weeks I will try to cut down to four meetings a day, and not book more than that.
The workload when it comes to teaching has also increased due to Corona. Instead of being prepared to discuss the content/material of my lectures, I also need to prepare the interactions with students to the very detail. In my classes very few students speak up in the zoom meeting classroom, so instead I use polls, and other interactive tools to keep them activated. These needs to be put in place before the lecture starts. Also, the lectures in themselves have been stressful with all kinds of technical issues, even though I am lucky enough to have had good help from Diane Golay who teaches the course with me.
Also the work load when it comes to the family has been different and heavier during these Corona times. The oldest son’s school is closed so he is always studying from home, and me and my husband work from home too. And at least one of the other three kids have stayed at home too every working day. So far there has been only two days with three people at home, and the rest we have had 4-6 people at home every day. This truly affects the grocery shopping, cleaning and cooking. When I sit in my meetings the kids play with different things, and the house is a mess. Unfortunately cleaning and cooking are not my favourite hobbies. I have never been so happy about our robot vacuum cleaner as these days. It does hard work cleaning the house every day! Another example of increased work load is lunch: Instead of walking to the the local restaurant at work we plan and prepare lunch for on average five people every work day. And lunch needs to be one hour due to meetings being booked which often is too short and there is no time to fill the dishwasher etc.
