Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter

Tent Poles

A lot of people are struggling with structure during this Covid-19 shut-down period. Though it might not feel like it right now, time is still valuable, and you should treat it accordingly, rather than let it trickle away, one tik tok at a time.

Adding some structure—not a rigid schedule—can help days feel less amorphous. In my book I talk about “bookending” each day with consistent wake-up and bed times, and that’s a great place to start. But unless you’re working from home and building your day around Zoom meetings and Slack threads, it can feel like there’s an awful lot of time in between. You may need more than just a beginning and end point. I like to think of tent poles: While there might be some slack between one pole and the next, if you space them right, your tent will stay up.

Getting up in the morning is a great first tent-pole. Lunch, which often gets short shrift in ordinary times, has become another tent pole for my family, and preparing and sitting down to a meal together has made lemonade (or lentil soup, as the case may be) of this lemon of a quarantine. Similarly, dinner has become an important tent pole. But maybe there are other things that you mean to accomplish every day—a quick workout or some yoga, or maybe a foreign-language study app or a creative writing exercise. These things should feel positive, not like make-work, and they should keep you moving, if not literally, then figuratively through your day.

For me the hardest time of day is late afternoon. It used to be my the busiest time of my day: coming home from work, answering emails, making sure kids were going where they needed to go and doing what they needed to do. Nowadays, I’d love to just take a nap. But a nap would mess with my bedtime tent pole. So my 4 p.m. tent pole is to wipe down all the doorknobs, light switches, remotes and so on. It only takes 10 minutes, but it shakes off my lethargy and gets me moving. The great thing about tent poles, is that even if I do opt to lay on the couch with a murder mystery for an hour after I’ve done my doorknob cleaning, I can’t really do it for too long, because my next tent pole is dinner preparation.

Giving some form and structure to your days allows you to capitalize on gifts of being at home: family lunches, morning exercise routines, expressing yourself creatively. This time feels hard—it is hard—but with some structure, you might find ways to do things you never felt you had time to do, and that might just be the silver lining you’ve been looking for in these dark days.