Surviving Lockdown - What Fresh new Procrastination is This?

So everyone’s facing the third week of compulsory Lockdown, and the signs of personal or family meltdowns are probably starting to show.

Unlike my husband and children who still have their structure – still working and schooling just from home, all my structure has gone. As my structure was all based around the school runs and getting the children to various after school clubs -  and fitting my writing and business work around them -has disappeared. So it's me who's getting the cabin fever.

I’m lucky, we are all healthy and my kids are older and more independent, and they don’t need me to home-educate and entertain them, and we’re also very fortunate to have space that we are not in each other’s faces the whole time. But I still have no structure and being at home all apart from one hour of exercise a day is a lot of time to fill.

I have been writing, but we have the issue of not enough computers to go around, my husband has his work laptop, my daughter on her school laptop- it has left my son working on the family PC, so writing all hours is tricky. I do write long hand and try and type it up when my son is on is lunch break, but isn’t exactly perfect.

So in short; long days + little structure + limited access to a computer has resulted in me getting cabin fever.

The one thing that has really helped me combat cabin fever and keep me sane, is the one thing that is usually the enemy of any creatives that work from home: Procrastination. And of course following lots of kid lit folks on social media have meant there has been lot of fresh new procrastination projects to keep me busy and stop my mind for spiralling into dark palaces.

So far I spent a few hours rearranging and photographing my book shelves for fellow Gold Egg, Becky Hamilton’s call out for ‘SHELFIES’ for an exhibition she’s organising for the Bath Fringe festival.

As a family we spent an afternoon, packing up the Easter Craft stuff that my son has brought to do fundraising for his expedition (now cancelled sue to corona virus), in to packages, and then randomly delivering them to neighbours houses that have children to help entertain during the lockdown. 

I spent a good twenty minutes taking photographs of the art that’s displayed around the house for Chitra Soundar’s #ARTonWalls over on twitter. 

A whole morning has been spent finding suitable reading material and photographing our sizeable menagerie after Paula Harrison nominated me to participate in Gareth P Jones #PetsGetReading . 

We are also taking part in the #NationalBearHunt, setting up changing scenes of teddies in our front window for the local children to spot when they are on their hours exercise. 

I know all these things may sound mundane, and daft, but taking part in these ever more creative Procrastination Projects, has really helped me combat cabin fever and stay sane, by breaking up the monotony of long structure-less days.


So thanks to everyone's inspires fresh new procrastination projects for they have really been keeping me sane!