Our very own YouthLiner tackles productivity amongst a national pandemic.
A reminder that YouthLine is an essential service during the COVDI19 shutdown. Teen volunteers are here to answer calls, texts, and chats from 4pm-10pm PST every day. Adults answer calls at all other times. Reach out if you need support!
With schools closing and businesses and organizations of all kinds shuttering around us, it feels like now, we have nothing but free time. For the many of us that are self-isolating during this corona-cation, we’re stuck at home with minimal, if any, schooling, and with everything else on our calendars canceled. But this is the break we’ve been waiting for, right? This is the time to get everything done that we never could normally, amid sports practice and clubs, homework and band, Youthline of course, and everything else that fills our busy lives. Well, not exactly.
Whether you raced home after hearing the news of school cancellations and created a day-to-day schedule of all the projects you were going to do, or if you didn’t, many of us are finding that it’s harder to be productive than we imagined. Duolingo has given up on reminding us to take our daily lesson, we’ve only used that workout app once, and there’s still so much dirty laundry. It’s easy to be hard on yourself when it may feel like all you’re doing is upping your screen time- but in reality, there’s a lot more going on than you might realize.
Even on a normal day, it’s hard to sit down and get things done, and even more so during a worldwide crisis. The daily situation of being home is not really because we’re on vacation, but because we’re forced to for our own, and many others, safety. Living through a pandemic is stressful, whether you’re feeling the effect acutely or not. The upending of our daily routines, the cancellation of everything around us, the new struggles being introduced in the light of COVID-19 (including a national toilet-paper shortage) are all entirely unprecedented, and take mental energy to deal with. Mental energy that cannot then, be put towards writing a book series or deep cleaning your living space.
With everything around us as precarious as it is, if all you can do today is get in the shower, applaud yourself. If all you check off your list is a 10 minute walk, that’s amazing. If you do nothing all day but exist through this crisis, you can mark that as an accomplishment. Reward yourself for little things, accept that you might not be exercising for three hours everyday, realize that maybe you won’t be fluent in Spanish by the time we get back to school- and that’s okay. Sometimes, all you can do is just take a shower.