Looking at the what is going on around me, I think I can predict at least one more year of a "lock-down" like situation. ¹ Each of us should ask, how should I spend that time?

This could mean considering rather big lifestyle changes. For instance, if you are a single, working person in a big city who is barely saving any money through working, perhaps it is time to re-assess the situation and decide is this arrangement worth it? The answer you come up with may be something like yes, but I need to spend less or even I need to move back to XYZ less expensive option. Regardless of where each of us are, we can determine what degrees of freedomS we do have and carefully consider how to exercise our autonomy.

Securing the Means to Work

Highly "institutionally coupled" types of work—e.g. skills in a particular piece of proprietary, corporate software—may not as readily transferable to another domain. Similarly, some jobs are very highly bound up with the current political/financial/etc institutions. Is an expert on tax codes this year and expert on tax codes 3 years from now?

Similar examples of highly specialized types of work that may not be readily transferrable if the occasion calls include,

• specialization with a particular type of machine you do not own (e.g servicing a particular sort of airplane)
• programing of various sorts—e.g. being an expert in some 3D gaming C++ library thing
• Specialized cooking, baking, etc that relies on not readily available ingredients

This isn't to say that you shouldn't invest in domain specific knowledge; rather, I'm making a reminder to myself that in addition to becoming skilled with whatever tools you are required to work with for a particular job, one should not lose sight of time management, more broadly. You do not want to "put all your eggs in one basket" if that basket can easily be taken away from you.

It is a good idea overall to find ways in which we can do work that are more robust to the winds of what is going on. Ways to do this may include,

• Owning high quality tools that can be used to do work, or may be (re)sold without much difficulty
• Maintaining networks of trustworthy friends
• Working on physical fitness
• Memorizing useful information (e.g. foreign languages)
• Learning general techniques to exploit readily available tools—being able to draw useful diagrams and organize data into charts can just as readily be done with a pen and paper as it can on a newer technology like Microsoft Excel and Google Docs ²
• Maintaining some kind of log (e.g. this blog) of how you are working through problems

The written log thing is also a useful way to keep you on track and motivated to continue working through stuff. With accountability to yourself (and an audience, if you happen to have one) you can more easily push yourself to keep on working even if you may feel lazy or unmotivated one day. Routine is very important for making steady progress.