On working during the Pandemic
Let me say right off the bat that this has been a good year workwise for me. I wrote about this previously. And yet…
I am experiencing a flash-back, a Deja-vu, of being out on my own, in the beginning when I had set up my home office and was trying to grow a business. Back then, I got up early, blogged or exercised before breakfast, pushed out content, created events and worked, or tried to drum up enough work.
I realized early on that I needed a bit more contact and structure. It was early days of social media so we organized Tweetups, worked out of cafés like August First (which you can’t do anymore; it’s too successful!) and finally got a small to office to share with my friend Justin. I still worked from home in the early mornings and late afternoons, but the office provided a structure and connection hub for me.
Finally, I moved into VCETs co-working space, a very good solution for me.
The Corona pandemic has brought me back to the beginning of that experience with some specific differences:
- I am busier than I was at the beginning of Digialicious
- EVERYBODY is working from home now!!
- I am in Stockholm and not Burlington
- The shift in social media has been for the worse
Let me deal with the last two, first. Burlington, and Vermont, has one huge advantage over almost every other place I’ve been — access and connection. It’s easy to connect with people or get plugged into local things. In fact, it might be one of the distinguishing features of Vermonters that they are more active locally than most everywhere else; or maybe MORE people are active than in other places.
And the access is off the charts. If you want to connect with someone, even if that person is a politician, a successful business leader or whoever, the degree of separation is so low that you can meet a huge amount of amazingly interesting people easily.
In Stockholm there are actually far more people doing amazing things who are pretty much inaccessible. Which is a combination of city size (more people want a piece of you) and the notorious Swedish reticence. I used to write a column in the Burlington Free Press called Creative Collisions, let’s just say that those collisions happen more slowly or seldomly here. I miss it. I miss it terribly during the pandemic.
And the shift in social media, well what the hell happened? Back when I went out on my own in 2008 Twitter was just starting and everyone was blogging with RSS feeds. There were ongoing conversations happening on the platform with a great amount of very smart people. Back then, social media connected us, challenged us, helped us grow. Amazingly I made some huge personal connections with people who it sometimes took me years to meet (if I met them at all). Today those connections seem very tenuous, less personal and less interesting.
What am I trying to get at here?
Even though there was no pandemic years ago, and I could actually meet people face-to-face, I faced very similar challenges of growing and connecting with new networks of people in non-structured venues. Now, during the Corona pandemic where we are all longing for personal connections, the best that we get are Slack groups.
I miss the random creative collisions. I miss the curiosity of the community.
Part of this is on me, for sure.
But for me the biggest challenge of the Pandemic isn’t the work, it’s the community.
Going back to the office won’t solve all of those challenges.
