Life in the Time of Corona

By Black Stars Press

In the blink of an eye, everything changed. 

Our lives are not at all how they used to be—and won't be for quite some time. 

But what exactly is the "new normal," and how are average people supposed to adjust to life after the pandemic? 

"Life in the Time of Corona" delves into these changes with relatable stories, practical tips, and personalized solutions, from optimizing your everyday schedules and workdays, to relearning socialization in a time when webcam meetings have replaced water cooler chitchat, and "going out" now means walking the dog in the same twenty-yard radius as yesterday…and the day before that. 

In this guide, you'll find completely customizable advice to live your best life right now, even when the rest of the world feels far from ideal.  It's structured to provide a simple roadmap to go from merely "surviving the pandemic"…to thriving in the wake of it. 

If this "new normal" isn't working for you, take heart.  "Life in the Time of Corona" is all about identifying, planning, and implementing your new normal. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Stars Press
• Release date: May 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201687595

Book preview

Part I: Daily Life

Your Daily Routines—and Why They matter

Imagine you’re building a house.

You have the most detailed, gorgeous blueprints available.  Your construction team is the best money can buy, and you couldn’t ask for better land.  Everything’s golden, right?

Now imagine that your bricks are...not the best.

Cracked and crumbling, they’re not a pretty sight, but you tell yourself they’re still good enough.  Bricks are bricks.  And you start building.

You see the problem here: brick by brick, you’re setting your house up to fail.  All the plans and teams in the world can’t prevent disaster when the basics aren’t up to par.

The same is 100% true in our lives.

Our daily routine is the fundamental building block (pun totally intended) to our wellbeing and happiness.  If it’s out of whack, so is everything else.

That’s not to say that a few bad days—like a couple bad bricks in a wall—are the worst thing in the world.  Bad days happen!  Sometimes we just can’t stick to our routines or good habits, and that’s okay.

In fact, that’s the entire point of them in the first place: the more good daily habits we establish, the less a few bad bricks here and there will matter.

Why is Keeping a Daily Routine So Hard Now?

Sure, on the surface this answer is simple: work, socialization, and childcare changed rapidly, so of course our routines changed with them.  And that’s a valid reason, since our daily lives are built around those aspects.

A routine is the structure of our day, or certain parts of our day.  It’s a streamlined process that helps us be more productive and at peace, because it requires less decision-making.

Consider this: when you take a shower, you have a set order in which you groom yourself.  You don’t stand there for five minutes planning what to wash first—you already know, and so your shower takes less time than if you had to plan it from scratch every single day.

That’s a routine, and one that can feed into a larger routine overall, such as getting ready for work in the morning.

So perhaps your pre-pandemic routine looked something like this:

Wake up

Drink coffee

Feed the dog

Shower

Get dressed

Get the kids ready for school

Get the kids on the bus

Walk the dog

Drive to work

Within this routine, you had several mini-routines.  As mentioned, you likely had a set way of showering, like washing your hair before you washed your face.  Maybe you always checked emails while drinking your coffee.  Perhaps you power-walked alongside your dog, to get a little exercise in before work.

After the pandemic, some of our routines changed drastically, and the rest of our routines and habits changed with them.

Let’s start with the simplest one: waking up.

Sure, it was a relief to not have to rise at 5 a.m. every morning, at first.  Who doesn’t love sleeping in?

But soon you might have found yourself sleeping too late.  Take a look at the domino effect this one deviation creates:

Wake up late

Drink coffee

Feed the dog

No shower yet, because you don’t have to go to work

No getting dressed, because you haven’t showered

Kids are out of school and disrupt your work-from-home attempts

Walk the dog

Check email, watch television, lie around, etc., when working from home keeps getting derailed

Suddenly it’s six p.m.; you prepare dinner

Realize you haven’t showered

Think what’s the point? when it’s already so late in the day

Stay up late to catch up on work you missed

Can’t sleep because you had your morning coffee too late

...and repeat.

Chances are, this new routine didn’t fall from the sky.  It snuck up on you, so gradual you barely noticed.

That’s the importance of routine—all our little schedules build upon one another.  If one slips for too long, it’s far too easy for the rest to follow suit.

And what’s more, our family and home routines are disrupted as well.  Notice how, in the example above, the children see a very different routine than they’re used to.  This further derails Mom or Dad’s routines which, in turn, can further derail the kids’.

HABITS VERSUS ROUTINE: What’s the Difference?

Okay: maybe you already knew all that routine stuff, and identified a long time ago why sticking to some kind of structure was important.

Most of us found everything falling to the wayside in some way, though—even the habits we did effortlessly before, without much thought.  Why is this?