April was the first full calendar month of COVID lockdown. In the beginning of the month I started getting comfortable with the working-from-home setup. I have a decent desk setup and a large master bedroom-slash-office space, which until early March I’d barely used since we moved in. It’s gotten a workout now for 2 months of all-day work. I’ve got one of these adjustable desks that’s nice and wide, with plenty of light in the room, so aside from the zero separation between work and life zones, it’s not too bad.

In this past week though the strain is coming on. Some of it is certainly the 2 months of social separation from anyone (which is especially bad for the kids, which is, in turn, bad for us), but I think working as a distributed company is weird, too. Productivity has still been high, and since we were already about 30% remote anyway, it hasn’t been the huge adjustment for us that it has been for many others.

Let’s look at the goal progress:

So I fell off the schedule completely in the middle of the month on the meditation practice. I went a few days without doing it, and then just fell apart with consistency. There wasn’t a specific reason other than laziness, and not building it into a morning routine as I had planned. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the practice, but I do intend to get back to it. One thing I’ve still got to get figured out is a more solid morning routine to create the transition from personal to work life more smoothly.

I closed the gap pretty well on the running schedule. The weather’s been unpredictably cool out a lot for Florida spring. We typically have the occasional cooler temperature in April, but this year we had a lot of days in the mid- to upper-70s to work with, which was fantastic for workouts. The kids have been along for the ride on many of them, probably most of them. It helps to get them out of the house; we usually go over the neighborhood bridges and go near some of the water and look for any manatees, fish, and whatnot. With that mild weather there have been some beautiful days to get out lately.

I closed out a bunch of books I’d had in progress for a while. I’ve referenced Martin Gurri’s work a few times here recently, and his The Revolt of the Public is one of the most insightful books I’ve read to explain the modern state of affairs with the culture war, political landscape, social media, and more. It was a lot broader than I’d expected, but highly recommended.

Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is a classic I’d had on the list for a long time. Very glad I spent the time with it. A grim work of historical fiction about Stalinist Russia and the Great Purge.