Recapping the week that was, and explaining the productivity boom that definitely was not

NASA image.

This week was intended to be the week of productivity. It didn't quite work out that way.

Like a lot of parents, the arrival of the first wave of COVID-19 threw a curveball at me — the kids were suddenly at home but I still had a job to do. The impact on me was probably less than for most. My wife is a teacher and took on most of the heavy lifting with the kids' virtual education last year, and was off over the summer. So my hands-on parenting was limited, at least during working hours. Besides, I mostly worked from home even before the pandemic. So I was well prepared on that front.

But my productivity certainly went down, because before the pandemic, when working from home, I was working at home by myself. My kids are now old enough to not require constant supervision. No diapers need changing or anything like that. But writing and editing, and all the little managerial organizing tasks I do, is a lot harder when someone comes along every few minutes to request more juice or show you the new video-game high score they just set.

During the last six months, I've become more clearly aware of something I've always understood about myself but never had to dwell on because it was never important: I am very good at pursuing one task through to completion, without interruption. If it takes an hour, fine. If it takes days, fine — I'll just break it down into small sub-tasks and get those done in sequence. What I am not good at is returning to work if I'm interrupted. This manifests itself in another way: as my wife could tell you, with hard-earned weariness, if I'm reading something, and she talks to me, I won't hear her. I'm not saying I'll ignore her. I literally won't hear her. That's how I write, too. And work. When I'm pulled away from what I'm focusing on, I'm often almost startled back into awareness of the world around me. I literally blink and shake my head — whoa, where did these other people come from?

(This is why I am one of those people who truly is more productive working from home ... in normal times.)

Being constantly pulled out of that zone chewed up my productivity. Not a ton of it, but I'd guess — this number plucked helpfully from my digestive system, as you can imagine — I'd lost maybe 20 per cent of my productivity with everyone home. Maybe 25 per cent?

So this was the week where I thought I'd bounce back. My wife has returned to work in person. My kids returned to school this week, also in person. For the first time since March, it was just me, my house and a long list of daily tasks. I honestly thought I was going to crush work this week.

I didn't. I held the line, barely. And only with help from my team.

I think part of the explanation is pretty mundane — the pace of things picked up a lot this week. With kids going back to school all over the place, and life looking something a bit more like normal, I think a lot of my colleagues sort of cracked their knuckles and got back to business over the last few days. Plus the signs of a looming second wave are keeping journalists hopping. Any productivity boost on my end was burned up keeping pace with the rising workload.

But, if I'm being honest ... I think a big part of it was that I just missed my family.

Marriage and parenting as an introvert is a weird balance. Most of you will only know me through my work, and might assume that I'm an extrovert, since I talk so damned much. But that's work. A performance. In my spare time, I am the classic introvert — social interaction, even when rewarding and desired, drains my energy. Time alone restores it. There's been damned little of that since March and I confess it has indeed been draining at times. But even introverts like having their family at hand, particularly during stressful, challenging times. Having my kids about and my wife at home since COVID hit was comforting even when it was draining.

This is another one of those life changes that crept up on me slowly. I used to love a weekend alone. I'd read, catch up on movies, stay up late tinkering with a telescope, whatever. If I had the time, maybe I'd play a full game of Civilization all the way through to completion. I'd come back to reality in a great mood, recharged for whatever was coming. Since getting married and having kids, I've gradually come to realize that weekends alone are no longer relaxing or recharging. They're just sad.

I guess this is the lament of the happily married introverted parent: you need to be alone to recharge but you want your family with you. If anyone has any solutions to this, please let me know. Other than putting the kids into bed early. That way they’re close at hand but also very peaceful and non-demanding. That’s good.

Anyway, for what I actually got up to this week, other than lamenting how quiet the house was, see below.

In the National Post, I wrote about the lessons we can learn for the second wave based on the loss of the space shuttle Challenger. No, I'm not kidding. That's what my column was about. More specifically, I'm writing about the limits of early warning. I'm actually a moderate optimist on the second wave. I'm watching the numbers cautiously, but I am truly mildly optimistic that we'll get through it without the mass death and major economic dislocation the first wave brought.

But this is, I admit, a judgment call. A guess, more accurately. There are many people, with impeccable credentials, who are warning that we risk disaster if we don't adjust course. And if they're right, we won't know it until it's too late.

I think about that a lot. What it must be like to be a real-life Cassandra, the Greek priestess who was cursed to always know that tragedy loomed but also to never be believed when she warned of it. There are historical examples of such figures. As I wrote in my column, in 1985, an engineer with Morton Thiokol, the rocket company that supplied the space shuttle's solid-fuel boosters, discovered a major design flaw. He and some colleagues concluded that the design flaw was likely to destroy a shuttle, and the risk was greater in cold weather. With Challenger scheduled to launch on a chilly January day, the engineers desperately tried to stop the launch. They failed, and seven astronauts died. 

There are people sounding warnings today, just like there were in 1985/86. But just like back then, there are other smart, educated, informed people insisting that no, disaster doesn't loom, and that people who think it does are wrong in their data, wrong in their conclusions, and wrong in their recommendations. 

Someone's right. Someone's wrong. And this time, we're all the astronauts. 

Also in the Post, I wrote though I'm cautiously optimistic about a second wave, we must also keep in mind what pilots sometimes call "get-home-itis": "An intense and compelling desire to return to home station at the earliest possible time at the expense of aircraft checklist deviations and general disregard of good judgment."

As a society, we're all suffering from that now, I argued. And that could end up blowing up in our faces if we're not careful: "[We] cannot assume the best just because it soothes our nerves. We are not just managing a virus now, or a ravaged economy. We’re managing human psychology, and our own private hopes, expectations and fears. Normal probably looks and feels like something different to each of us, but the common thread of this shared experience is our longing for it back."

Meanwhile, over at TVO.org, as signs of the second wave become clearer and Ontario begins re-imposing some restrictions on daily life — minor thus far, but real — I stressed the importance of the premier and his officials setting out some red lines and stating, clearly and publicly, what they are. 

"One of the main lessons of the first [wave] ought to have been how quickly our governments clearly became overwhelmed by the scale and breadth of the crisis,” I wrote. “And setting out clear benchmarks to guide our response now, before the crisis becomes acute (if it does), would make our future responses better. Put bluntly, we don’t have to wing it again, unless we choose to. Which we shouldn’t. ... The point isn’t to pick which red line is best or where to set it. I’m not qualified to do that. The point is that we should have a red line, one that is clear, simple, reasonably easy to monitor even with our lagging indicators, and disclosed publicly in advance. This would give everyone — from the public right on up to the premier — the ability to have clear, understood targets, a threshold chosen rationally and coolly in advance that could be referred to later, even during a catastrophe.

"The other option is to do what we did the first time: leave it up to individual public-health officials and elected leaders to make their decisions on the fly, in the heat of a rapidly unfolding crisis."

Also, I'll end on a programming note, of sorts: Normally I'd write a big series for TVO.org each month, where I dive into a particular issue and cover it in three or four (or even more) articles, capturing as much of the complexity as possible. With the COVID-19 situation unfolding so rapidly at present, I spoke with my editor this weekend and we agreed to skip that this month. I'll still file the same number of articles, but not in a big series. The honest explanation is that things are so in flux at present that any such series might be obsolete by the time I'm able to complete it, let alone publish all the parts. 

That's all for this week, folks. As productivity bounces back to something more like normal, I expect Code 47 will be busier. In the meantime, thanks for reading and take good care.

mgurney.responses@gmail.com
Twitter.com/MattGurney