Has working from home made you lazy, or did you flourish with productivity?

May 2020 Wrap-up.

As a writer this whole self-isolation thing did not impact me so much. But it desolated my house mate who lost his job and any prospect of future employment until the travel ban is lifted. (Most of his work is located interstate.) I had to help him apply for early access to some of his superannuation and sign up for unemployment benefits to get him through the interim. Though the process is just filling in forms online, it takes a knock to your stress levels and pride. Poor buggar. Curse you Covid-19!

So I can’t complain about the fact that my creativity plummeted because having an extra human around barging in constantly with questions or statements like “Have you seen the peanut butter?” or “I’m going to mow the lawn” and “Have you seen this funny Youtube clip?” Another irritating habit is him blurting out a conversation he’s obviously been having in his head – but he verbalizes it half-way through and expects me to understand what he is talking about. Not once in any of his activities does he think that me sitting at the computer with Word documents open typing away furiously is any form of work.

I want to tear off one of his limbs and bludgeon him to death with it when he responds to my sighs and complaints with “You work from home, you can do that anytime.” Seriously mate, you’re walking a thin line. My time is still valuable. I work like I would any other job, except my office is located in the house. You don’t see me tapping on your window at your job site saying “I’m just going to take a break, make a cup of coffee and have a poo.” It’s inane right? It could be really annoying if I did that fifty times a day at inconsistent intervals. And if you were wearing headphones so you couldn’t hear me, I’d tap your shoulder incessantly to break your concentration and get your attention with another snippet of irrelevant information; that wouldn’t start to send your blood pressure rising, would it?

So I shouldn’t complain, I still have a form of income, I can still get to work, only now I have a new person in the office verbalizing every thought like he has Tourette’s.

But I managed to plow into my blog and have started getting into the month ahead, freeing up more time in June for me to get some more chapters written on my WIP (sans house mate verbal diarrhea.) May hasn’t been the month to get a lot progress on writing my novel, but I have been writing non-stop on some paid work and scheduling posts. Also, after a mammoth month reading in April of 20 books, I was content to complete a smaller number of books in May totaling 9, and I’m happy with my progress. Still no buying of new books, and knocking that ridiculously high number of novels down on my TBR shelf/box/stack to 420. (Don’t judge me I’m doing a good enough job myself.)

With all the whining I did in the opening of this post, I have to say having my house mate home has it’s good points. He’s tending to our property with some gardening and tree maintenance, getting those odd jobs done on the house that have been waiting for close to a year, the house gets cleaned more regularly, the washing is magically done, so too are meals, delivered to my desk without asking. And do I help him in the extra free time all this chore-doing has created… urm, well, actually I end up reading books. So while I’ve been more productive in some areas, it’s made me lazy in others. But it all balances out in the end? Right? Am I justifying my indulgence as recompense of the many abovementioned work interruptions?

 

How has this lockdown affected you? Did you take advantage to get some writing or reading done?

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