Life Lessons From an Unplanned Sabbatical

Turn these 8 simple adaptations into lessons — for kids too!

Millions of people are forced to stay in their homes during the coronavirus outbreak. Some can work from home, some can not. Many contract workers, entrepreneurs, and solopreneurs find themselves in an unplanned sabbatical.

Unexpected, unplanned, unbelievable situation — but here we are. And we need to do what living things need to do when they are under stress — adapt, evolve and survive.

Being angry or frustrated will not help in the long run — vent if you must, and then start to adapt.

Becoming lazy or lethargic will also get you nowhere — take a day to get over, and then tell yourself that it is time to evolve.

Having a tantrum about losing personal freedoms will not show your children how to deal with stress — pull up your socks and start teaching them some important skills. If your children are as crazy about “Minecraft” as mine are, call it “survival mode” — they will get it.

As our family has been adapting to home isolation, we’ve tried to use each opportunity to create a lesson in life and share it with children. Along the way, we learn more about ourselves.

Adapt to multiple offices in the same household.

When I worked from home before as a newly minted solopreneur, I had my own home office and my routine. Now we have several people who need to work remotely on their schedule: me and my husband, our oldest who is now finishing her university semester from home online, and middle-schoolers who will need to learn with online resources for a while.

Now, we all must adapt. Each person needs a quiet space to work. We use headsets to filter out the noise. We put all our schedules on a whiteboard so that children know when the house needs to be quiet for a video conference or an online lesson. We settle on a suitable lunchtime so that the family can eat together.

Even though there is a lot of advice on maintaining the same routine when working from home — the reality is, the routine needs to be tweaked every day when you are sharing the home office time and space. So we adjust daily and move on.

Related posts:

The project goes by the name Tencent Blockchain Accelerator. It is to be a highly important gear-wheel in the Tencent Industrial Accelerator’s endeavor to boost the digital service in the future…