During the COVID-19 pandemic, schools and daycares have been closed, so my family decided to use this as an opportunity to make some habits to make sure we can get through this period with minimal interruptions to life and work. Here are some habits that have worked so well for us that we’re planning on keeping them, even after the kids go back to school / daycare.
Keeping a schedule
We use a schedule to make sure the time we eat, sleep, and do activities are at regular times every day. At first, I thought this would be a good tool to let the kids know when we were working and when we could play together, but it’s proven to be a useful tool to both adults and children. I’ve written a blog post in Japanese about this as well.
Cleaning the house every day
This is related to the schedule, but we clean up the house every day at 5 PM, start the Roomba, take a bath, then get ready for dinner. Before, we would clean up whenever we felt like it, and as you can imagine, the room got pretty messy. We’d probably vacuum once a week or so. Now, the house stays clean and it’s much less stressful.
Taking the trash out
No, this isn’t a euphemism. Before, we would let the trash (especially recyclables like glass bottles, cans, etc) stock up before bringing it to the trash room, but now that we’re a little more flexible on time, we can take it down to the trash room immediately.