During the Coronavirus Period, Everything is Harder — Here is Why

The days go by fast and they seem not to deliver as much as they once did. Work we want to complete waits unfinished, with many of our most hopeful aims or projects languishing despite that hope. The coronavirus reaction should have simplified our work in many ways; it cleared commitments from calendars. Why is it instead that seemingly everything is more difficult now?

Perspective first: I am lucky. Perhaps you are, too. I do the sort of work in which I can take a laptop home and keep going. Not all work is like this, which is why so many have been without work while their businesses and workplaces have been closed. I have nothing to complain about, so no complaint is intended here. Rather, I am offering an attempt to chart a phenomenon I believe many of us are confronting: the general sense that to “keep going” is harder now, even for those with the opportunity to do so. Why?

On the surface, it seems things should be freer. Hasn’t time opened up? Yes, to an extent. But we also face a significant drag on our ability to make good use of time. And while the disruption that swept calendars clear is easy to see, the headwind before us now is harder to understand, because it is a gale built out of many different breezes at once.

Why are things more difficult now? Why is the work to which we’re accustomed now harder to do as well or as quickly as we did it only months earlier? While the problems might have no ready solutions, seeing the problems at least brings clarity. Work in general is harder during the coronavirus period, and I think I see at least five reasons why:

1. Unspoken personal problems tax us all.

Seemingly everyone has one or more personal problems they carry day to day during this crisis. The problems vary in scope. They might be emotional — some level of depression, disjointedness or anxiety arising from this time. They might involve family, either extended family members or children. Yet even this last point of commonality offers little common ground, because the children — the preschoolers, elementary schoolers, teenagers or college students at home with us now — find different kinds of struggles at each of these different stages. Given that our problems are all so different and we are aware that everyone else has problems, too, we simply don’t talk about these things. But my difficulties affect you, and vice versa. If my attention is taxed, it bears on the work I give you. To be sure, we forgive one another — there is a lot of grace being extended during this time. But if there is a little bit of delay or deficit in the work I give you, it affects the work you can give someone else, which might be compounded by a bit of delay or deficit because of the tax on your own attention, and so on down the line. All our output together is dragged down by worries we can’t quite see.

2. Video meetings are not good meetings.

A video meeting can take the place of a conference call, but not an in-person meeting. Indeed, a video meeting is generally better than a conference call, and many (including me) needed this crisis in order to see that. The practice is here to stay. However, video is no substitute for physical presence and the information this presence conveys. In fact, video meeting is exhausting in the extent to which we’re trying to make it work right now. We push against the interpersonal disconnect of this medium, and we try to process the facial and body language cues that misfire within this context. To have many video meetings in a day is to have a day with high psychic cost. And days like that are common now, because the uncertainty of the time breeds more meetings, not fewer.

3. Big pieces of our work are missing.

Many of us are trying to make due without some basic component of our work that is missing now. For me, this missing piece is travel to manufacturing sites. To understand and report on new ideas in manufacturing (the core of my job), I need to go see these ideas play out. I pick up clues from the facility, from the people there and their interactions with the systems, and from the unexpected details that catch my eye (the things I point to and ask, “What is that?”). Right now, there is no choice but to proceed without this opportunity, to try to get something like the same information at a distance. And many of us in many different roles are doing our own versions of this: trying to build value with fewer raw materials, and using fewer tools.

4. Experience is little help.

Experience is supposed to be the benefit of being more advanced in your career. But there is no experience to draw on here, because this situation is unprecedented in all our lives. Each of us thus carries the weight of an asterisk on our plans, because none of us confidently feels they know what the next 60 days or the next 6 months will bring. Habitual planners are at a particular disadvantage, losing time to repeatedly forming and revising their plans. (By contrast, I’ve seen some evidence that those who tend to move with less structure have a surer footing now.)

5. Fun is gone.

I have an ice cream shop in my neighborhood. It’s still open, but employees wear masks and engage customers with a brisk sense of emergency, and no one is welcome to linger in the store but instead has to take their purchase out into the street. I share all this to say: If the fun can be taken from ice cream, then this is a mark of how much we have lost. The point is more important than it seems. The line above perhaps overstates it — fun is not gone altogether. But fun has become scarce, while the burdens it might help to offset have grown heavier. And attempts to compensate can be counterproductive. (Is video chat a workable substitute for friends meeting in person?) In the absence of opportunities for lightness, we are left to plod ahead. And while a human being possesses a tremendous capacity to plod, the result is not as fruitful or innovative as work that is lifted on updrafts of joy.

What can be done about the problems above? Nothing, it would seem. For some of us, that very point deserves to be an item on this list: the pain of being a habitual problem solver forced to wait out an unsolvable problem. 

The accommodation I am coming to is recalibration. Time is taxed, attention is taxed and enthusiasm is taxed. This is true of me and true of others. We are all still moving, and I can still ask great things of talented people and aim to deliver as much myself, but the new difficulty is a variable we have to recognize, and have to factor into our plans.

Peter Zelinski is the editor-in-chief of Additive Manufacturing and Modern Machine Shop, and the co-host of The Cool Parts Show.