UKC

How has Covid changed your lifestyle in a way which will continue after things get back to 'normal'?

A couple of obvious ones for me are:

Home Working - Whilst I've never had a problem with members of my team home working, I've been largely resistant on a personal level. The last nine months has shown me that a balance between being in the office and working from home is beneficial and will be splitting roughly 50/50 in the future.

Car Use - We went from being two car household to a one car household about five years ago, so sometimes not having access to vehicle is something we have learnt to deal with. However, the first lockdown particularly put us in the habit nearly always walking any journey of less than a few miles and often further. Our mileage through Covid is probably a third of what it was, this will increase, but will remain significantly lower than what it was.

In defiance of forecaster’s expectations, I will travel more often, including long haul. The lockdown has helped me realise what a gift my formerly unrestricted freedom from traditional work is (was!) and determine to make more of it.

Having once eschewed online shopping for fear that the retailer may go bust at any minute, I shall henceforth forego the pleasures of the High Street* for fear that the retailer may go bust at any minute.

* excluding local shops

Shopping, Mrs Jones was eligible for free supermarket deliveries during lock down,they continued until last month, never used them before. Now they are £1 to £2 depending on the slot time. Stuff we used to get from grocer/butchers we now get straight from farms. Part of this afternoons walk is past the harbour to (hopefully) get some fish straight off the boat.

Edit Mrs Jones insisted I add UKC. Previously I had used it, mainly if I had found a route harder than expected ,to hopefully see others agreed. Now I spend too much time "reading nonsense some random punters  post on the internet"

Edit 2 She now wants me to add that the main change for her has been her use of our sewing machine. She is rightly proud of raising £15000 for local charities (current one is Cockermouth MR) by making face coverings.

I doubt I will carry cash routinely again (although this was happening anyway)

I'll never work in an office again (possibly  ditto).

We’ve gone to larger, less frequent shops; once every 10-days or so. Much better.  

As a household we’ve gone from 0% WFH to 75% WFH and hope to keep that up.  

Radical career change when I realised I wasn’t going to retire happy in my old job and that the best time to make a change is now.  It’s satisfying moving from something spending tax money to creating something that’s pulling in foreign cash and sales.  No safety net now but if it comes to that I’ll find something...

Milage hasn’t changed as my new labs are much further from home offsetting the WFH.  I’m eyeing up a 2014 manual M3 to clean up the commute vs my current diesel.  They’re an investment, honest...  

We learnt to make pizza and have generally enjoyed cooking more, although my mind does wander to the local curry house quite often.

Biggest change was Jr going to school rather than the pandemic.  

The big eye opener for me was just how much totally unsubtle manipulation is going on over the issue of the day.

We’ve always done a lot of local walking but this year we did a lot more and found some really beautiful woodland walks, not always expected - one of the old drover’s road through the woods west of Esh Winning stands out.

Yes, cash is another one. That fear that cards wouldn't be accepted for small transactions has gone.

Interesting question

I think it will be a long time before I am comfortable in large gatherings.

I think COVID has also curbed my urge to travel (cramped planes).

It has also put me off streaming films. With so many people watching stuff on a Friday night everytime I tried to watch something it would freeze, or buffer, to the point where it was actually unwatchable. Back to DVD's for me.

I am looking forward to meeting up with people again though. Zoom doesn't do it for me

My office is full of paperwork and books that I do not miss.

The paperless office is a reality at home.

I no longer cycle commute in the traffic and rain. It's quite novel only to cycle quiet roads and when dry.

Probably none. I shall also probably cope with the guilt.

Edit: But hopefully never use Zoom or Microsoft f****** Teams again.

The schoolboy in me, sniggers every time I read that town name.

I am looking forwards to meetings with biscuits again.

however Zoom does have its place and it’s something I think we will continue to use. 
Even stuff like talking through the draft of a paper with a student seems a bit easier if we can screen share rather than awkwardly huddling around a computer.

Since Covid I’ve enjoyed various little projects in my garage, most of which are ultimately pointless but pleasurable nevertheless. I got a belt sander for Christmas last year which was in danger of sitting in its box for ever until Covid came along. I’m very happy tinkering in there whilst listening to Radio 6.

My garage is now also my gym, mainly kettlebells. I’m undecided whether I’ll bother going back to paying for a gym - there are pros and cons.

I’ll be seeing much less of someone who believes that Bill Gates wants to put a microchip in him and other such sh1t. 

If I weren't on the brink of retirement I'd say that I'd be continuing to WFH after it's safe to go back to the office. I'll also use much less cash, I haven't paid for anything in actual money for months.

Other than that I think the reality is that not much will change. A bit more internet shopping probably, I'll still be travelling to the hills and travel around my city won't change much. I expect that after we're vaccinated I'll take less care over social distancing but will continue to wash my hands a bit more frequently. I'm also looking forward to returning to the gym and the bouldering wall. I walk more than I used to and have discovered bits of my city I never knew existed perhaps that may continue.

Although I did hand over £500 in cash last week (legitimate transaction!)

I now have to yell at poorly behaving teenagers through a mask, rather than not through a mask. Otherwise not much, particularly since the autumn term arrived and the schools went back.

Both my partner and I had to work in some form through the first lockdown, and we both worked as normal though the last lockdown, but we have now been informed we won't be getting pay rises for the foreseeable future - so getting poorer (how much depends on inflation I suppose) is a lifestyle change that won't being going back to normal anytime soon I guess.

Faster Payments make most of those use cases easy enough to do without cash, e.g. selling a car - you stand next to the buyer, both with phones in hand, they transfer the money, your phone shows it has arrived, you hand over the keys, sorted.  Removing the delay in that sort of transfer removed the need for using large amounts of cash for it.

I zoom with my mates and message them at the same time.

I get up late.

I spend lots of time wondering what I'm going to do with my life.

I watch the snooker while I'm eating.

It's like being a teenager all over again.

I normally work seasonally. Super busy from about March to October and have a quiet winter with bits and bobs of work but lots of time to get out on the hills and do lots of crafty things etc. This year I have had to change my work completely and I am working 55 hours some weeks! I am not planning to make this a permanent change and I am looking forward to my old life getting back on track. However, I have appreciated driving significantly less for work, so I will be trying to look at how I can reduce the distances I go for my normal work. I hate driving!

My mum started running during lockdown 1 and she is now doing up to 8km a few times a week! Not bad for starting at age 62! She even decided she fancied a run on one of our really cold and wet days earlier this week and enjoyed it when she was out! I never thought I would see the say my mum ran!

 I think the "which will continue" aspect of your question is very interesting, as I vividly recall all the excitement at the novelty of the spring-summer lockdown when people were gleefully reporting the demise of cheap airlines etc and incessantly reposting about dolphins in Venice, and saying that the world will change for the better and we'll never fly to go on holiday etc. etc. 
How quickly people forget  

For me, there's probably only two things I can say will continue:

1 - I have become a lot more house-proud and generally more domesticated; I spent too many years allowing myself to live a slovenly lone-householder life with some parts of the house frankly squalid. 

2 - maybe related to the above - I am eating better quality food. No more supermarket eggs and much less supermarket meat (soon to reduce to zero supermarket meat). 

Plenty of other lifestyle changes have occurred but I can not promise that I won't revert "back to normal" in "normal" times. 

Good question. 

Our biggest one is that MrsD has brought her retirement forward a couple of years because she can't cope with trying to do her job from home.

Wow, that's amazing, well done to Mrs J.  

I think the main one which I will probably continue is showering and getting changed immediately I get home after work.  

It saves time in the morning and it feels like I'm washing the day away.  

I was ahead of the covid thing and already avoided any part of a working day that involved sitting in an office and listening to other peoples' chat. I've got a laptop and a phone and get stuff done as I need to at all times of the day and night so what is gained by my sitting in an office 9-5? 

Now I do most of my lessons online too, and having finally worked how to do them well I now much prefer it that way. They easily work as well online as long as everyone is online. When it is split, it is stressful for me, but the students don't seem to mind, wherever they are.

The reduction in driving is a blessing, and not just for me. In one of my classes, all of the students bar one had been driving at least 50 miles to get there. 

In 2012 me and the wife convinced our respective employers to allow us to do our office-based, London jobs from home. What made this better was that Home was then able to be a nice place high up in the French Alps. The downside was lots of international travel but it was good to get back to civilisation regularly and to see friends when in London and I convinced myself this was a fair tradeoff.

So the biggest change the 2020 WFH revolution has brought is widespread acceptance. Neighbours 'get it' and don't just assume we're retired (admittedly early), monied British immigrants. Colleagues realise its not a skive, and they all have been forced to put the effort into video calls etc and have a bit more empathy with my position (not that I'm asking for sympathy). 

I was really lucky to be ahead of the curve. We've both got dedicated office setups at home that are really pleasant to be in - so when lockdown started we weren't scrabbling to set up something on the kitchen table.

French lockdown started three weeks after I started a new job. Luckily I managed a couple of trips to the UK in that time and met a few dozen of my colleagues face to face, but have since then met so many others only virtually. The biggest change is the lack of travel - this has been great, not least from an environmental perspective but I am missing some face to face interaction and will look forward to it when it resumes next year sometime. I hope however it means that it won't be as frequent - hopefully the business as a whole and my colleagues realising that it will be quality rather than quantity when it comes to getting people together.

Our London office has already said that they're considering not really ever having it as an office again - really just workshop/meeting facilities and a few hotdesks. Everyone is still free to WFH and nobody ever really needs to come back but is free to use the facilities - I guess its more of an issue if you don't have peace and space in a smaller London property.

I’m lucky that I have had an office set up at home for years, although I did have to do some serious sorting the seeking before I started working from there full time. The dining room table would be a nightmare for me.

Actually another change was I finally switched my normal desk for a standing desk. It's great to be able to do the odd call standing from time to time. Until I wasn't paying attention and manage to crush my laptop screen under the beam behind my desk as it was raising into position. 

Well I've gone the other way, from being home based with travel to various sites on a regular basis, to being based on site in an office away from home 5 days a week. Staying in partially open hotels and living on cold food for the year.

Could be worse, several colleagues have been laid off due to the travel restrictions 

WFH full time has been revolutionary for my employer. There was huge cynicism that we all could be trusted to do it but productivity has gone up. I’ll not be working more than 2 days a week in the office going forwards and face to face meetings will be more organised from now on.

School pick ups and drops offs are not the stressy affairs I feared they would be and I have time to amble and chat in that golden zone before she forgets what she wants to tell me. 

Travel for me has always been a means to see my family so I’ll look forwards to doing that again. FaceTime doesn’t cut it but has been useful. 

I''d changed jobs about 6m before Covid came around, and was working 4 days a week at home anyway but I'd definitely like to keep it this way in the future. 

We lived on a boat before but, due to the lack of space, we rented a property from my sister on the first day of lockdown in March. After an up and down year we craved a bit more stability and bought a house which we moved into last week. 

In a way to force myself to not get back into a job which required lots of time away from home / commuting I decided it was the right time to get myself a dog too (after many years of frequently looking after friend's dogs and always putting off getting one). 

We've been super fortunate to be able to change life so drastically and not be impacted financially by Covid. Quite looking forward to our new life!

Laughing at people who used to say manual work was unskilled...been essential workers throughout while alot of clever jobs got told to stay locked in the house

Almost zero. It screwed my holidays and weekends away visiting friends - these will revert to normal as soon as possible. Apart from that my job/lifestyle was all ready nearly covid proof.

Interesting how many references to WFH there are on this thread (plus a couple of teachers who aren't WFH now). It might be due to the thread being a bit 'self-selecting' but I think it also reflects something about UKC's users.

I never liked WFH as I live a 10 min walk from the office and I didn't have the facilities for WFH. Now I've got used to it and have the facilities. Not been to the office even once since Lockdown 1 and probably won't venture there until I've been vaccinated (so late summer / autumn next year probably). I don't think anyone in our office will do 5 days a week again.

I suspect the average will be 3 days a week. I'm thinking about moving from central Brum to somewhere like Matlock if I can 'get away with' only 1 or 2 days a week in the office (I'd like to go at least once a week for the social aspects). Time will tell. Anyone want to buy a city centre flat in Brum?

I also never liked paying by card for small purchases. Now I don't even bother carrying cards most of the time, never mind cash, it's all paid by phone.

This had already started before covid, but I agree that it will now be accelerated, it will be interesting to see by how much. Prior to covid, there had been an increase in the number of parents living in Cumbria, but working in Manchester/Leeds etc. 1/2 days a week. A (lawyer) friend of mine lives in Dumfries and goes to the London office for a few days every 2/3 weeks.

Most people of working age choose their place to live based on where they work. Everything else comes secondary. That means compromises - sliding the dials on length of commute, quality of schools, size of home etc. 

If WFH becomes normal, most of the time, for most people, then the those dials can be slid more in favour of lifestyle factors and less on commute. If you can live further away, maybe you can afford a bigger place, and have a better setup for home working. I

t will take years to kick in but I would hope it will result in a better spread of quality housing rather than people being successively priced out of living close to major business centres, then giving up and leaving when it all gets too much.

Your not kidding, the part of the world that works still has to go into the factory, dig holes in the road, plough fields etc. The ones that bury the first group in worthless paper rubbish and introduce even more complex "online" systems to prevent normal people from encroachinfg on their patch and protect their jobs "work" from home!

I've spent two days of non-productive work trying to get an export reference number which is going to take 4 weeks to generate plus buying specialist software to go into a system my crap internet can't support to get yet another number for a shipment which has already been collected and then returned. Previously I just filled out a form, signed it and away it all went.

The best idea would be cut all WFH people from the internet for 3 months and see if we come up with a slimline and efficient system!

Chip weighing down your shoulder?

I hesitated to answer this because I'm pretty sure you're just good-naturedly trolling. But as one of those people in your targets - I don't do much 'grafting' - I figured I might as well put a point of view.

The problem with your argument is that if I was forced to dig holes or whatever for a living, I could pretty much do it. I'd hate it, it would be misery, backbreaking work but I have the transferable skills - I've got two arms and legs, pretty strong, would only get stronger if I dug lots of holes and would undoubtedly get more efficient at it pretty quickly, with minimum instruction.

But if pretty much anyone can dig a hole, I wouldn't have much more to offer than the next hole digger. As soon as a hole is dug to an acceptable standard, the only thing that would concern my boss is digging holes more cheaply. So somebody would undoubtedly come along and offer to dig holes for less. It would be a race to the bottom (sorry).

Now my job (digital marketing) might seem worthless to you. But I do a good job of providing value to my employer. We take something, which has intrinsic value, and we add perceived value so that people are willing to pay a premium (over the intrinsic value) for our product, which has many competitors of similar quality. So the main (not only) concern of my employer and their desire to pay me, is not how cheaply I can add this value, but how much value I can add. 

There are others who can do just as good a job, or better than me, but it's a lot harder to quantify that easily, without giving someone the job, and a couple of years to get on with it.

So a hole-digger could reskill and do my job - but they'd likely need a decade or two of experience as well. If they were taken out of hole digging and thrown into my job the next day, they'd do an objectively worse job than I would if the role was reversed.

The fetishisation of a 'hard days graft' and 'proper work' is something I was surrounded by growing up and it was only ever used to keep people down, don't get above your station. Even through mine closures and deindustrialisation of whole cities, the adults around me clung to the idea that putting your head down and grafting was the way forward even though the evidence in front of them was that manual labour was increasingly lower paid and more scarce. The only people that attitude benefited was company owners and shareholders who exploit those who do the manual labour.

Worthless? You seem to be admitting to worse - that you are just a skilled conman.

And with that the whole capitalist system collapses.  Pretty much the whole basis of it hinges on marketing - selling to people why they should pay more for the thing you're selling than you spent on making it.

I was referring to "perceived value", not profit.

I was more pointing out that calling a marketeer a conman was a bit of a stretch, unless you think the whole system is wrong.

Depends on the  marketing. 

Could you elaborate on that please? Given that you’ve basically said that all digital marketing is a con, I think that we deserve some sort of explanation. You do seem to enjoy lecturing, so I’m all ears. I’m receptive. 

Indeed, though for me it’s mostly about being closer to climbing. Equally, a major reason not to move (assuming I could mostly WFH) is that there would be no climbing walls within walking distance... and after work outdoor climbing in the Peak is only an option for a few months a year. 

I suppose how viable mid week climbing is in the peak depends on your job flexibility and core hours. That could also change after COVID some what. The company I work for has given us every other Friday off work for free and it looks like that may conitinue after COVID for example. If you could finish work at say 3:30 some days starting early then after work climbing could easily be viable for 6 months of the year, weather allowing ofc.

No I haven't. I said it depends on the marketing.

It just seems to me that the creation of this "perceived value" is a con.

I was working from home a fair bit anyway, but it’s settled down to going in a couple of days a week now. These are the days that I have to get together with my team and go onto wards to connect patients up to our monitoring equipment during treatment. It’s the coal face of medtech research. I brought enough kit home that I can build prototypes, then the rest of the time is data analysis and running research programmes. Big change is working weekends and taking time off during the week to avoid the massive crowds at the moment.

Car mileage has dropped off the scale, saving about £250 a month in fuel. Pretty well stopped going into Sheffield and now shop locally and hit the supermarket on the journey back from work. Same for the climbing wall, mostly take one in on my way somewhere else.

Good question. I think the Covid situation has taught me that I don't need much, and that I've been able to adjust surprisingly easily. That cooperating is far better than competing. Take each day as it comes. Any feeling of comfort I might want from getting 'back to normal' has to be set against a fast changing world, and dare I say it, the effects of climate change that will be far more impactful than Covid. Ironically, 'Us' climbers seem to be as set in our ways as the 'average' person in being unable to make the required changes for a happy future. I like the title and content of the current Reith lectures.......'How do we get the values that we want'. Its quite intellectual for me but I'm hoping for some clarity by the end of it.

My Covid lifestyle is exhausting. I'm one of those lucky frontline workers, which means I've been working flat out now for coming up for a year.  I've had 2 weeks of during this time, but nowhere to go!  I'm also a single fulltime parent, which has meant a lot of home teaching.  Most of my work is face to face, so WFH is not an option most of the time.  The occasional hour or two that I have free, I can go to the Peak District, but then seemingly so does everyone else in the North of England, so a little too busy currently.

I am hoping nothing from Covid lifestyle remains when all this finishes, I can go back to having a slower less demanding pace of life and a HOLIDAY!

Its kind of missing the point though isn't it. Most value is perceived. The value of your house - why can two identical houses, same size, made of the same materials, same age etc be worth vastly different amounts in two different parts of the world?

All humans have needs, and fulfil those in different ways. You might think of yourself as a discerning individual who isn't manipulated by any of this but frankly that's not true - not really for any of us. Ever since the first caveman decorated a rock on the ground to woo the woman in the cave next door, humans have bestowed 'perceived value' onto things.

We could do away with marketing - lets have no brands and we can just have 'products' that are clearly labelled in plain packaging.

They pretty much did that in the Communist bloc countries. What happened was there was no incentive for a producer to protect their brand, because they didn't really have one. Quality was shambolic - people got poisoned and ships literally fell apart because factories weren't accountable for their ingredients and the people making rivets had no incentive to protect quality.

If Volvo couldn't market the perceived value of their cars as safe and solid, why would they invest money in making their cars safe and solid? If Coca Cola started adulterating their drink with anti-freeze they wouldn't last long and consumers could easily vote with their wallets. Say what you like about their brand, but if you were in a part of the world with questionable hygiene standards, you could be pretty sure that the can of Coke would be a safe choice.

I think many people get defensive with marketing because they think they're being 'played'. Well in effect they are - we all are, but we're complicit in this and it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing.

Yes, there is a separate problem around unchecked consumption but it's a different point. We need to buy outdoor equipment to go climbing for instance, so I'd rather Patagonia have a reputation they can justifiably market for ethical manufacturing process and low impact production so that consumers can have a choice (and potentially withold custom from those at the opposite end).

Creating need where it isn't already there is pretty difficult to do - you could argue Apple did it with the smartphone but also argue that was a natural evolution, they just packaged it better. What most marketers aim to do is create preference within an already existing category.

Like it or not you're a participant in this game hundreds of times a day - knowingly or not.

Dear Robert,

Bless you. I was referring to your 18:35 reply to yorkshireman. He said he works in digital marketing, you said that makes him a con man. Yes, there was a bit about "perceived value" in there, but you looked like you were referring to the job itself, as you were addressing the "worthless" aspect which was in the first part of yorkshireman's post. However, it seems that I did misunderstand, so I thank you for your courteous clarification. Enjoy your day. 

I've taken a load of holidays this year with nothing particular to do with them, and I've actually quite enjoyed it - it's a bit like going back to school holidays of just having relaxing, fairly aimless time off, rather than you trying to get the best use possible out of (a smaller number of) days of annual leave as you do when you grow up.

Only two noticeable impacts for me:

- Much less travel (for work) which I class as a negative since I considered seeing the world a big perk of my job

- I can be less social without appearing rude (big positive). For once I don't have to come up with excuses to avoid tedious pre-Christmas meetups and I can avoid all the silly hugging and kissing people like to do here in Spain all the time.

There are other impacts, such as being able to save more money, mainly because I travel less, but I wouldn't call that lifestyle changing. 

Nice post, I agree wholeheartedly. I see so many people say "I never fall for advertising". 

Indeed a regular poster on here has made the claim that he's never ever fallen for marketing, whilst elsewhere praising a certain actress (whose name on a film poster is essentially marketing) AND writing a book that names a brand of dehydrated meals and also refers to purchasing some equipment or clothing based on having seen an advert in a magazine  

I think it really hammered home that my immediate locality doesn't provide what I want. There was always the option to travel to some good climbing venues, beaches, mountains an hour or two away but when this was taken away and we had to do with what we could travel to on our own steam, it's really made it clear to me that I need to be somewhere within walking/cycling distance of the places I want to be. 

me too, I live about 90 minutes from the mountains, moving next month to be within 15 minutes. Its made me want to be closer to the stuff I want to be near.

I also remember a lot of people talking about how they wouldn't be frequently flying short-haul back when this all kicked off in March. I'm now hearing a lot of U-turns with people anxious to get away on holiday as soon as they can. 

I really hope that our air-travel is cut down after this and not that we just go back to normal. Remember, the planet is still trashed. 

There's also flexibility around when you can work, eg instead of working till say 7, finish at say 5 and then do 2 hours after getting back in the evening - something I currently do with going to the wall for example (except it's more like finish at 8, go the wall, come back and do another couple of hours - but the principle is the same.