What I write here tends to be what I'm thinking about, with a general theme of 'how people adapt to technology'. Right now, our society is undergoing a seismic shift - millions of people are suddenly living and working in a totally different routine, much of which is enabled by the internet and online services - meaning I've got way too many things to be thinking and writing about to actually write any of them down.

So, this is a "for now" post while I try to get my head around what comes next.

At the bottom of our stairs, near the front door, we have a blackboard.

Usually, its a pretty simple grid with days of the week and things the kids need to remember on those days - so one can check on a Wednesday and make sure that they don't forget their guitar for guitar lessons, or another can see that its Arts Club on Tuesdays (or Beavers, or Scouts, or whatever.)

All of it was suddenly irrelevant. So, fresh start.

Where do I start? Do weekdays/weekends even matter any more? If I'm working from home with the kids, should I be prioritising my work around the Monday to Friday 9-5? Or should I be prioritising keeping things as "normal" (ha) as possible for them, and having their school work scheduled for 9-3 on Monday-Friday, as a lot (but not all) of what I'm doing (which I guess you would call 'knowledge work') can be done before 9am, after 5pm, or at the weekends.

Today is the first "schools shut" day, with no real idea how long this is going to be going on for. A lot of people in very different circumstances are going to be asking themselves the same questions, and a lot of them are going to be coming up with different answers. Or realising that what they thought was the most important thing turned out to not be quite so important after all. (I'm feeling reasonably sure that 'bake bread' is going to become one of the rows on my new daily timetable - partly because getting fresh bread to the house while in self-isolation isn't easy, and partly because I went through a phase of baking bread a few years ago which I quite like the idea of going back to.)

Everyone has their own routines, with parts that are deliberately decided and parts which are adapting to others. But for most people (in the UK, I think), those old grids aren't just boxes being emptied out, but the fundamental assumptions of where the gridlines should go are being questioned.

In 6 months time, the issue of dealing with the coronavirus is almost certainly going to be over. But when things go "back to normal", normality is going to look different.

The thing is, its entirely up to us where we decide to draw the lines. If someone had said 6 months ago that we were going to turn off a bunch of factories in China, and we would be able to literally see the difference it makes to the air quality from satellite photos, I don't think many people would have said that it would be possible. Turns out, it is possible, and it happened.

What else will we learn that humanity is capable of when we rethink our assumptions?

Some Random Nerd