In Munich, 21 April

A month in quarantine

"Me and my wife started stocking up on essentials since the end of February, anticipating the crisis, every weekend, slowly. So, when the lockdown was announced in Munich, we were good to go. From mid of March our respective offices declared mandatory work from home. We did set up a home office during the last Christmas holidays to work from home, in a proper way. An ultrawide monitor, a laptop stand, and an external mechanical keyboard made so much difference in the experience of working from home for me.

I like going out for a walk occasionally. So, for me the first few days of lockdown was tough, especially on my mental health. I was feeling jittery most of the time, and the apartment, felt like a prison to me. Though exercising outside was allowed, we tried to minimize our evening walks to once a week and chose odd times to minimize contact. In the first few days, I tinkered with some free DJing apps on my iPad to deal with the boredom, but that thing did not keep me busy for long. We went ahead and bought a pack of cards and played some card games during the first two weekends. By that time, home exercise videos started popping up on my YouTube feed and I wanted to give it a try. We had a pair of free-weights at home and those helped me get through the mental barrier of exercising at home, for the first few days. I took it up slowly, and my wife started joining me during my evening workouts. Right now, we workout at least three to four days a week. And that helped my mental health, I feel a lot more energized and motivated. We have been experimenting with cooking new dishes a lot together and have more time for my hobbies like photography (restricted to food photographs only, at this moment).

I wish we had a better internet connection to minimize the issues we face while working from home, streaming movies, or playing online games. Working from home, sitting side by side with my wife is not easy, especially during simultaneous morning calls, we use our headphones as much as possible, and my clicky mechanical keyboard definitely doesn’t help. Sticking to a routine as much as humanly possible, dressing up for the video calls, making better habits, knowing when to stop working helped us maintain a proper work life balance during the lockdown."