Ways To Productively Occupy Your Time While Stuck At Home

In 2020, our lives all took a surprising turn due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and in addition to the threat of a highly contagious and potentially deadly virus, there was also the reality of living under lockdowns. While the scary times of the pre-vaccine era are over, there is still the chance that a new, deadlier variant will arrive, or even an all new novel virus, and we may one day have to go on lock down again.

Last time, this was totally new for all of us, but now we have a decent idea of how to survive under lockdown. Still, it is always important to have a plan, so should we go back to such a scenario, we should have an idea of how we are actually going to spend our time. Everyone may have different preferences, but we have put together four good ideas for how to keep busy under lockdown.

Put Together A Home Office

If “work from home” is the new normal for you, then you want to have a nice setup. Working at the dining table or from your bed is fun for a while, but eventually you want to have a proper dedicated office area. Even if you only work from home part time, it is still good to have a real desk, and chances are your future will have more time spent working at home. If lockdowns come back, then that would be a great time to put that nice home office together.

Having a separate room just for working is ideal, but otherwise a comfortable corner will do the trick. You want your space to be well designed for extended periods of work, so this means a comfortable chair, an ergonomic desk setup where the keyboard and monitor are both at the right level. Don’t just think about your work space, think about the background as well, because that’s what people will see on video calls. You may also want to improve your wi-fi situation, depending on how reliable it already is.

Start Journaling

If living under lockdown was stressful for you, then you want to have some coping mechanisms in place for next time. For some people, journaling is an effective solution. Just writing down what you are going through is surprisingly effective at making you feel at ease about your situation. Focus on both the highs and the lows, and it will help you look at your life with a bit of distance, away from the immediate emotional turmoil of living through scary and uncertain times.

It may even make for some interesting reading material some years down the line when this is all over. Think about adding artwork, too, if you have the ability to do so, as making art is a great way to relax. There are many different structures and formats you can try, including bullet journaling, and you can learn all about them and get more tips just by searching on YouTube.

Buy A Large Jigsaw Puzzle

It is good to have projects to do under lockdown, giving your life some purpose and structure, with a routine that you can return to day after day even as your typical returns have been turned upside down. If you can start some sort of project that you will be proud of years down the line, great, but let’s be honest, most people don’t have that sort of thing in them. There is something that anybody can do, though, and that is a jigsaw puzzle.

Jigsaw puzzles are especially great for families, and they are a great way for you to focus on something and forget about all of your well justified worries about the world. Get one that is large and complex, preferably with thousands of pieces, so that you and your family can work on it for weeks, if not months, and feel a deep sense of accomplishment when it is finished. To commemorate your lockdown days, you can even frame the puzzle.

Learn To Play An Instrument

If doing a jigsaw puzzle seems too frivolous for you, you can get more ambitious with your personal lockdown projects. Picking up an instrument is a great example of something you can do to take up your free time. It is a great distraction, practically guaranteed to make you forget about the deadly virus raging in the outside world. On top of that, it is a skill you can take with you for the rest of your life.

Considering pretty much everybody wishes they could play an instrument but most people never actually take the time to do it, lockdown is a great time to make it happen. In this day and age you don’t even need individualized instruction, just go onto YouTube and find tutorial visitors. There is one caveat to having this as a lockdown hobby, though. While it may make your own lockdown better, it may have the opposite impact on the people you live with, or on your neighbors.