COVID-19: The Gift of Time and Space
Photo by Jackson Hendry on Unsplash
A caveat: As a mom to two girls, ages 12 and 9, I feel for parents who are currently working a double-shift— simultaneously trying get work done and adjusting to working from home while also homeschooling / entertaining their children. This article about the gift of time and space will likely evoke frustration or jealousy for those not working the double-shift. If you’re trying to just make it through the day without erupting at your partner or kids… you’ve got plenty on your hands right now.
It’s been a week of shelter-in-place for us in San Francisco. As a friend, as a neighbor, and as a leadership coach, I’ve been getting most of my energy this week from service. Service for me is spending more time with clients, leading support calls with friends, and doing group coaching for a variety of my communities. Most of my day-to-day work is remote, other than the now-canceled in-person workshops and speaking engagements. I’m grateful that I’ve already been able to learn to adjust with working from home and developing meaningful connections with people over video conference.
Right now, all routines have become completely up-ended. Everything is seemingly out of our control. We don’t have the luxury of going out to dinner, meeting up with friends in a bar, going to the gym, or watching movie or plays. As a leadership coach, I often point out that my biggest competition is the status quo. COVID-19 is currently disrupting that. Now our daily routines feel uncertain and out of our control. This is an opportunity to re-examine regular habits and schedules. Typically, these habits are engrained within us, and we are stuck in existing patterns. It’s hard to identify areas that we want to be different in our life, where we want to learn and grow. What if this social distancing could be a trigger? What if we use the gift of time and space to experiment with our lives?
If you have the gift of extra time and space, how do you want to take advantage of it? Consider 4 areas of exploration: Make, Learn, Think, and Connect. I guarantee it’ll be more fun than watching more news!
1. Make
Have there been projects or things you’ve been wanting to create but have never had the time? For many designers, there’s the side-projects we always want to do. Personal projects whether it’s a canvas, a podcast, calligraphy, or an app. Consider all the things that you could make with this time:
Arts: painting, drawing, sketching, photography
Crafts: knitting, crochet, scrapbooking
Cooking & baking
Woodworking & carpentry
Gardening
One personal side-benefit is that it’s fun to do projects with kids. I tend to be a selfish mom and work on projects that interest me. When they were younger, we worked on collaborative abstract paintings. Right now, they’re particularly enjoying learning to draw Totoro and they would have enjoyed Mo Willems’ classes if they were younger.
2. Learn
What do you want to learn about? Right now many educators are making their resources free with articles covering free Ivy League classes and platforms such as edX and ClassCentral. A quick browse finds some classes I’d love to take:
The Science of Well-Being from Yale University via Coursera
Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science from Harvard University
Viral Marketing and how to Craft Contagious Content from the University of Pennsylvania
What else, maybe less high-brow, do you want to learn? Play that ukelele you bought a couple of years ago? Brush up on your high school Spanish skills?
3. Think
When I worked at Facebook, we tried to make time for focus blocks— 3 hour chunks of time to focus, work and get things done. In our rapid days now, we often move between 30-minute chunks of meetings, multi-tasking as we go. How would it feel to have blank chunks of time focused on nothing more than thinking? Could you focus on dreaming what type of life or career you’d like? Some questions I typically ask my clients to think about when we start working together are:
What do you want, personally and professionally in your life, that you don’t yet have?
What is/are your passion/s in life? What brings you balance, flow, joy, relaxation, etc.?
What is a secret passion you don’t think is possible?
If time and money were not factors, what would you like to do, be, have?
When you think of making a positive contribution to the world, what do you want to offer?
At the end of your life, what would you like to celebrate?
If you were to do any other job than the one you have now, what would it be?
What else would you like to think about?
If you’re running your own business, what products could you dream up?
If you’re working for a company, what else could your customers use?
4. Connect
Crisis, especially when communally shared, is a unifying force to bring people together. Since we are practicing social distancing, consider that we now have the gift of apparation, to seemingly bypass the constraints of travel via video conferencing to re-connect with friends or family. Everyone is now home, and likely more available. Who would you like to re-connect with today?
Bottom-Line
Do you have extra time and space in your life with COVID-19? Use this disruption of the status quo to explore something different. Consider what you want to make or learn. Use the time to think, or to connect with people through video-conferencing.
Using the Design Process to Get Unstuck
Photo by Alexander Mils on Unsplash
Are there areas in your life where you feel stuck? This is a deeply intrusive, vulnerable question, while coming from a place of curiosity. I embrace being curious & inquisitive, both as a coach and as a designer. More often than not, people answer with an embarrassed look / averted eyes or a pithy quip: “Is there any area of my life where I’m not stuck?”
So, where are you stuck right now? We are all humans and as an essence of our humanity can tend to have many shared commonalities. We are often stuck:
losing that last 10 pounds
between voting for a unelectable progressive and a middle-of-the-road, boring moderate
mitigating losses in my event business due to coronavirus cancellations
in my current relationship
wanting more in my job and feeling unrecognized
playing mediator between my product manager and engineering lead
longing to do more at work to be successful AND also spend time with my loved ones
Are any of these familiar? Being stuck is heavy, low, uncreative energy. We are unable to see the path forward as we are dragged down by honey and mud.
Here’s where the design process comes in!
Exploring Divergence
At its most basic form, the design process is divergence and convergence. Divergence is generating a large number of ideas. Some call it ideation or brainstorming. The specific ideas themselves don’t really matter. It’s the volume of them that matters. There is a magic in going through the process of generating more and more. Divergence is challenging the team to come up with 10 variations of the drawing, 30 different directions we could go in, or 100 new ideas for the roadmap. Most of the ideas will be messy and bad… and that’s OK. The value is in the volume—the quantity not the quality. Letting go of the pressure of “good ideas” opens up a new creativity where more ridiculous and outrageous concepts can come to life.
If we know how to do this in the work context, in generating ideas in a brainstorm, this creativity can be transferred to a life context. Rather than generating new product or business ideas, strive to generate as many new perspectives as possible on the topic where you’re stuck.
Let’s say that I feel stuck playing mediator between my product manager and engineering lead. If I’m working with someone else, my manager or a coach, I might be able to jump in a room and brainstorm solutions together. It helps to have the joint energy of a group or another person. If I’m alone, I use a technique called mind-mapping where you capture the topic in the center of the page and then free-associate what comes to mind when you think of the topic. The topics continue to branch with more free-association around the new ideas.
Mind map I sketched in 5 mins around the topic of Mediator
I spent less than 5 minutes capturing a mind-map around the topic of Mediator. I started from the top right coming with a perspective of being Stuck. Quickly starting to generate new ideas, so many things starting opening up though this process of creative divergence— gratitude for having a central seat at the table, questioning if there needs to be a villain, exploring the possibility of co-creation.
Coming to Convergence
Convergence tends to be easier for people working in tech. It draws upon the skills of problem-solving, decision-making and getting sh!t done. Once you have a giant list of explored items, we tend to want to move towards selecting some to narrow down and act upon. We can establish more formal criteria, perhaps based on our values or what we’d like to do long-term or what matters most (e.g. the relationships within the team). That’s what the product manager in me would do. Or we can simply make a list asking ourselves the question:
What do I want to say Yes to? What do I want to say No to?
We tend to be drawn towards actions. An action might include going to coffee with both people to build trust in a neutral setting. Yes, you should capture the actions that open up after the divergence. Additionally, in the example below, I call out perspectives & attitudes we can choose to say yes or no to when looking at this stuckness of playing mediator.
Simple 2 column list of items to say YES and No to
Examples from above include saying yes to the perspective of Celebrating being in the room where it happens, and no to the perspective of being Afraid to be in a central role.
Bottom-Line
Divergence & convergence is the key to getting unstuck.
Next time you feel stuck in an area of your life, apply the design process of divergence and convergence to generate many new perspectives on the topic. It’s playful. It’s fun. It’s messy. The creativity in generating possibilities from your current situation naturally drives movement/motion/dynamism which fuels our natural sense of problem-solving.
Come play with me and try it!