[image by Melissa Delaney, Covid Meditation, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 2020]

In a pre-COVID world people took pride in being busy. What do you think the new busy will be in a post-COVID world?

GEMMA: It’s not a million miles away from ‘busy’ but I’m observing a lot of pride around being agile and nimble. I think we have to be so careful of knee-jerk reactions though, give ourselves time to properly process what is going on.

SUSIE: I'd like to think that post-COVID world will allow us to think beyond neo-liberal, capitalist models of constant productivity. Especially as we've seen how society runs off our 'essential' workers in retail, care and construction industries. But I don't believe it will. We've already seen a desire to move past the difficulty that the Pandemic presented, the light it shone on the uglier, more uncomfortable aspects of our lives. I think along with many other pretences of normal life, people will return to being 'busy'.

MELISSA: The busy bees have continued to be busy bees during the Pandemic. With a lot of unnecessary content creation and noise. While people scramble to show worth, it’s interesting one of the standouts has been the kids of Tik Tok organically entering into a playful space which has soon become political globally.

As I currently live alone, I can’t comment on what the situation might be for a family, or people living in partnership and also working with children. I’m sure that brings a whole lot of different challenges.

For me personally I dumped the busy thing from my lexicon and philosophy a few years back. I prefer to make space, to peel back. Counter intuitively this as a practice has allowed me to set better boundaries and to be more productive. I’m a fan of lists and like to have a few key targets a day work wise. For me it’s about self-worth and health and I’m satisfied with intrinsic value. I’ve had ‘busy’ work in the past where I’ve been constantly riding on unnecessary stresses and it is not healthy or sustainable in the long term. I see myself more as a marathon runner, in for the long haul. The Pandemic has reiterated for me the importance of making choices that serve my health and wellbeing ultimately linking to a robust immune system. If i am run-down and erratic I begin to fray at the edges which doesn’t help anyone.

I’m hoping employers will be genuinely flexible in work patterns. For example the tech co Atlassian has recently announced their staff able to ‘work from home forever’ and that they are focussing more on ‘outcomes, not clock hours’ https://www.afr.com/technology/atlassian-lets-its-staff-stay-at-home-forever-20200807-p55jhx

At the beginning of the Pandemic earlier this year (2020) I know a few people working for large firms in traditional workplaces (engineering, law etc) had bosses who were saying they HAD TO come to the office to work despite government directives not to. Their work could easily have been done from a well-equipped home working space. The bosses shifted later in the heightened lockdowns and actually changed their views when they gained trust and saw their teams were delivering their work from home. We all know people in the work=place who sat at a computer all day in the office and didn’t work. Where we are physically located and how our days are structured is now open up to more.

BECK: The antithesis of busy would be inactive and in a lot of ways I think people will become inactive in outdated systems and will focus on cultivating their core values such as family life; social equality; human rights and care for the environment.