Quarantine tip #1: stop checking your phone

I get it: the world is in lockdown, you’ve probably been sheltering in place for more than a month now and the only way to get in touch with your family and friends is through your phone or your tablet/pc. In times like these it’s important not to lose contact with the people you care about, they might be feeling lonely and a quick chat goes a long way to keep morale high.

But.

If you want to make something out of this lockdown, besides saving lives just by staying at home (which doesn’t happen very often, I have to admit), you probably want to do something productive with your free time. Maybe you want to get the dust off some books that you bought years ago but never had the chance to read, or maybe you have a side project to work on, or you want to learn how to play an instrument… Whatever the items in your to-do list, it’s important to reserve some quality time for those activites, especially if you’re lucky enough to be working from home (which gives you the wonderful excuse to be too tired at the end of the day to do something that goes beyond drinking a beer while watching Netflix – it happens to me too, much more often than I would like to admit).

This means that, at least for those periods of time (which can be one hour, half an hour, two hours - it’s up to you), you should silence your phone and not check it every three minutes to see if someone is texting you, or videocalling for today’s happy-hour, or tagging you on Facebook (or whatever’s fancy these days). You should treat those hours the same way you’d treat them if you were in a real class, or in a real library, learning something new, focused on your task. Just make a plan and stick to it. Then, when you’re done, by all means, go check your phone and have a chat with your friends, it’s literally quite healthy for your immune system.

This lockdown is probably (and hopefully) something that’s going to happen only once in a lifetime for most of us, so let’s try to make the most out of it and better ourselves. Rough waters await us on the horizon, let’s show them we will be prepared.