How I spend my 21 days in quarantine

Background

As covid hit the world. Things changed for many, including me. Travel restrictions came up and quarantine became standard in some countries if you were about to enter. For me, it is right now a 21-day long quarantine in a hotel room to enter Vietnam. Clearly not something everyone would sign up for those days when people even claim they will resign if they have to be back in office full time. But hey, I did and I am currently on day 10 of 21. This is how I prepared, and how I spent my days.

Preparations

So, does it exist any other group of people I could study before doing to do my "1 man Big Brother" experiment? Sure, inmates are also restricted, as well as astronauts. So what can we learn from them? After some reading, I came to the conclusion that a schedule with tasks was the best way forward, and to stay occupied with things and avoid procrastination, full focus on my goal. I gathered a huge backlog of tasks from the office, got some remote access to company systems as well as a daily plan on extensive stretching, pushups, and situps. I can tell already now that my initial plan was far from enough. After looking out from the window the first evening I told myself silently; "20 more days?! I need a better schedule!" Let me tell you how I run my days, from that time and onwards.

Schedule

06:50 - Alarm rings - Time to get up. I make my bed as taught from military service as my first daily task to deliver. I make a small movie about my last day and send it to a group of friends, sharing my very extravagant life at the moment.

07:00 - Alarm rings again to indicate that someone just knocked on the door, and the breakfast set is now standing outside my room on a table. No one is there when I open.

07:10 - I start all systems and log in and start looking for immediate challenges, before doing situps, pushups, and stretching. This is followed by a shower and breakfast in my "kitchen", another room where I eat, my purpose is to create different focus zones and stay structured. I always turn on the TV in the morning and leave BBC News on for the rest of the day. It makes me feel like there are things going on around me. I also always put a white shirt on and make my hair. The white shirt means I have moved from the "free me", and walked to my office and should start focusing on my work. Since I am not physically in place at the site, I prepared some dashboards to follow the performance on the production floor over our MES system. And since I had no extra screen with me, I took the freedom to "adjust" my room slightly the second day in quarantine so suit my needs. Small iterations when solving problems you know. I think it turned out pretty well, right? From here I run my backlog, and support in the event of any questions from the site. I must say, it's very productive to do backlogs alone in another time zone.

08:45 - Temp & laundry alarm rings. I prepare the laundry to be placed outside my door in 15 minutes. This together with a "temperature scorecard" I need to provide to the staff, indicating my temperature at this time with a signature. I always laundry my shirt to fool myself mentally that I am well dressed and stay productive. It also allocates some of my time and makes my days less monotone by performing this standing task daily. I list my weight in a spreadsheet and continue working on tasks I prepared. In the beginning, I tried making "Fika" breaks with myself, something that is common in Sweden. But I gave up and just continued working, decided that the temp break was enough. Much of my work is related to preparations and things I can clear before reaching the site. Before lunch, all work is focused on the site or backlog.

12:00 - Alarm rings again. Now there exists a lunch bag outside my door, no one is there when I open it. It is usually great food, with a mix of western and Asian cuisine and some fresh-cut fruits. After my first 3 days of logging my weight, I realized I had to eat less.. So now I skip the carbs and focus on veggies and protein after some consultation with my good childhood friend Joel. Once again I change to my "kitchen" room and take a break. I listen to what BBC tells about the world and watch a weather forecast covering the whole world, so now I know the temp in Cape Town, Beijing, London, Sydney, and so on. Great, isn't it!? I usually eat, clean up the stuff and get back to work after some BBC. Around now, Sweden wakes up and meeting starts on different topics. Since I am awake first of all, usually my email ends up on top in everyone's mailboxes related to different matters and people from HQ, so replies start to come quite soon on different topics.

14:45 - 2nd temp check. I perform a temp check in my armpit with the intended thermometer provided by the hotel. I also always take the temp in my mouth with my own thermometer and log this in a spreadsheet w. graphs. On my first day, the hotel's thermometer showed me 38,5 degrees Celcius. Not a great start for a person in quarantine due to potential covid... So I requested a new thermometer. And since then, I always take the temp with two different thermometers. Temp form with a sign has to be outside my door at 15:00. Weight is logged in the spreadsheet.

16:00 - The alarm rings and tells me to lower the temperature in my room to the lowest possible and tells me to drink 1 lite of water. This I did not do the first two days, but I had crazy abstinence for not moving and exercising enough. So I was thinking if it would be possible to run in the hotel room, and I did not see any issues with it. So I started to prepare a run every day. The first day I did not lower the temperature before running, this is when I realized it is a must. Water is to remember to prep, it's easy to forget to drink when you sit isolated alone.

17:00 - Alarm rings, laundry is now outside my door. Do you think anyone is there? ... I unpack and change clothes to running gear and shoes. This means I left the office for the day now when the shirt is off. I now start to run with some upbeat music in my headphones. You may ofc ask where? In the hotel room! As I adjusted some things with my desk, I also moved some furniture to allow myself to run around in the two rooms. Every time I am about to change direction, I run all the way to the wall or door and do a pushup, while changing the direction. Before quarantine, I had a yearly average of 7,1 km daily. So I was asking myself, would it be possible to do 7,1 km a day at 64 sqm? So far I haven't found a single reason why it would be impossible. On my second day, I did 11 km in the room. Normal? Perhaps not! But I needed to set a goal and stay focused. And until today, I am not aware of anyone else running 50+ km in a hotel room. So that became my first milestone. When writing this, I am at 63,1 km with a new goal of 100 km. Some have called me stubborn during my career, they are most likely totally correct. But, I put plenty of pride in differentiating hard things, from impossible things. My job is to make hard things happen!

18:00 - The alarm rings again and tells me to increase the room temp to 22 degrees, drink 1 liter of water, as well as pick my dinner outside the door. At this time, the music in my headphones has faded and I am exhausted. I learned the first days, that running without socks, as I normally do, would be a no-go when doing this many start and stops as my feet are still full of blisters. I do some stretching and eat the once again great dinner together with BBC as my BFF, before heading for a shower. As I need to allocate the time in the evening at something, I trim the beard and sometimes take a bath before putting a t-shirt on. T-shirt means I am now off work and can casually do whatever I like. Emm, kind of at least. Within the hotel room... Around 19 I usually start reading some news, text some of my friends in China, who is about to leave office. Since all my Swedish connections are still in work mode. Usually, work continues another 3-4 hours with some small chats about open topics. But I try to stay out of it if I just have something to stay occupied with. Writing an article like this for instance. I also change the screen from office mode to Youtube and add some Above & Beyond music playing abnormally loud to create some euphoria feeling, fooling myself I am not alone. See the pillow? I had a chat with HR and they pointed out the importance of ergonomics. They are right, it is clearly better for the shoulders coming up a bit higher. Same with the display stand, aka my suitcase.

19:45 - Alarm again, time to prepare the trash for the day and put it outside of my door before 20:00. All my garbage is classified as a biologically hazardous material. Around now, the schedule is also less occupied and some loneliness starts to appear. So I usually try to support my colleagues on things that are in my email and are probably a bit over social, compared to the regular task-oriented me. Now is also a great time to prepare things I know the site needs HQ support on, so I usually drive those tasks a bit alternating with whatever I find to do that is non-work-related. Youtube and videos about cell manufacturing machines have been quite frequent those days. I also tend to crank up the music.

21:00 - Around now I usually go for a walk. And by a walk, I mean walking around in the hotel room. Like an evening stroll barefoot. I try to text some friends, as most people in Sweden now are off work. Perhaps do some calls and put my stuff in order and prepare for a new day after some reading, fine-tuning this article, stretching, and other random things. Tomorrow, the full schedule repeats again from 06:50.

Reflections

On day 6 the phone rang, it felt a little bit like the Big Brother host was telling me to do something. This time I should visit floor 2 for a PCR check. When walking down I realized I had no idea where I was heading or how I did enter the hotel in the middle of the night 6 days before, and I felt a little bit odd. Coming back to my hotel room gave me a strange feeling of "getting home safe". At this time, I started to think about those stories of people living hidden in basements for years, not taking part in society, but still not running away. By that moment, I started to understand why they don't run away. A very strange moment! Being alone for this long time makes you think about things you never thought of, and the movie "Castaway" is suddenly very real.

But, even there are strange days for me sitting here, I put plenty of pride in making the best of it! Challenging myself along the way, pushing limits, and setting goals. That has become I vital part of who I am, and what I do. With this story, I hope I can inspire some of you to push yourself a little bit more in your desired direction. Whatever it is, or might be. I am pretty sure most of it is not impossible. Perhaps hard, but not impossible!

Do you have some similar experiences yourself? Feel free to share with me in the comments. I would love to listen in on how you did or what worked for you! Or, just send me some nice words to allocate a bit of time on. "High five" for instance.