COVID Diary - Daily Diary Edition

Keep a time journal for one day. journal/Document what you are doing in 30 minute increments--try to be as specific as you can. You can use your phone, you can write it down--whatever is easiest. At the end of the day block out the time into categories. How do you spend your time? Did you find what you thought you would or did you find anything surprising? How has Covid changed the way you allocate your time? How hard was it to keep track of your time? How hard was it to be honest about it? Why? Did studying your time journal make you want to make any changes? If so, what?

• 7:40am - Since I was up until midnight last night watching Mindhunter with Alfred I slept in but to be honest this is my new normal.   I woke up and looked at the socials, checked my email etc.
• 8:00am - Got out of bed, washed my face, started water boiling for coffee and sat down at my computer to start working.  Without the commute I can be logged in working 5 minutes after I get out of bed.
• 8:30am - I didn't have any early morning meetings so I took care of some emails,  then did some paperwork for Grad School and found out the my summer cruise had officially been cancelled -decided not to rebook this year but to move until next year and switch from the Bahamas to Alaska. This meant I spent some time being sad
• 9:30am - I had a coffee call with a group of friends from work..  We realized a few weeks ago that we tend to get the most sad about our current situation on Monday mornings so we made a commitment to connect via video every Monday morning until we are back in the office
• 10:00am -Answered emails, made and ate breakfast
• 10:30am- Call with one of the VP's I support we would usually do this by phone anyway since she is in CA so nothing different here. At some point in this call the boys came to the kitchen, made themselves breakfast and ate.  I gave them kisses and said good morning.
• 11:30am - Took a break to do some household chores and chat with Alfred and the boys
• 12:00pm -Ate cake and brushed my teeth for the day (don't judge) and worked
• 2:00pm - Warmed up a lasagna and ate lunch while doing a WebEx meeting
• 3:00pm - Virtual HR Team meeting (This isn't different since we all work in different locations)
• 4:00pm - Did a bit of laundry and started to wind work down 
• 5:00pm - Officially logged off work, changed and did an Orange Theory On Line Workout while Alfred made dinner
• 6:30pm -  Took Shower while we were waiting on dinner to come out of oven
• 7:30pm - Sat down with family to eat and watch an episode of Manifest
• 8:30pm - 11:00 Decided tonight we would have family wii night so we headed to the Bonus room to play wii games  (At some point during this I had a work emergency come up and to spend about 30 minutes working)
• 11:00 - 1:00 (I assume this is when I will go to bed) Watched Mindhunter with Alfred

My biggest finding was that I spend about the same amount of time working as I did before.  Some days are longer but other than not seeing people face to face the amount of work and what I do haven't changed.


The biggest change to our schedule is that we don't have to take the boys to school. We (Alfred) commute almost an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening in addition to our regular commute to take them to and from school. (We leave the house at 6:45am and we don't arrive home until 6:30pm) Not having that commute has given us so much time back. Also the lack of homework in the evenings has made life so much easer!  In addition because no one has to get up early most mornings we can stay up watching movies and playing games as late as we want.  We have so much time together. Most evenings we take a family walk but today I wanted to do a longer OT workout and Kingston was talking to his friends on Zoom so we didn't and I missed it.


If I changed anything it would most likely be that we need to do a better job at putting the boys on a consistent school work schedule. They are learning and reading but there is very little consistency.


I do know it will be an adjustment to go back to our post COVID life.