It's a marathon. And a sprint.

It’s no surprise that now, in the time of Covid, my sense of time and, I hear, that of others is a bit messed up. I’ve just counted fourteen weeks in my diary since things were remotely normal and of course that feels like forever and no time at all at exactly the same moment. A little bit of calm reflection about that might be helpful.

We know that everything’s relative, thanks to Einstein, but time is psychologically relative as well as physically relative. In other words, we all experience it differently and we even experience the same hour differently if we spend it doing different things. An hour in the garden over a sunny lunchtime seems like no time at all compared to an hour with a spreadsheet in my Stygian basement study.

So commonplace, but so significant, is this aspect of the human experience that Philosophers, Psychologists and Neuro-Scientists have spent, well, ages researching it. Just a small measure of their hours of thinking is that we all know the benefit that mindfulness brings. Making the conscious effort to be in the present moment versus worry over the future that has yet to happen or recrimination over the mistakes of the past is good for the psyche as well as the soul.  

And the context of that longer view might just be the perspective we need, or at least I do, right now. A political and economic consensus is emerging that the true effect of the last three months will not really be felt before 2022. It will take that long for the inquiries to really determine whether our Government, any Government, really did the best they could and it will take at least until then for the financial blockage to pass through the plumbing and let the economic waters flow freely again. If the last fourteen weeks have felt like a lifetime what will the next twenty four months feel like?

Of course we’ll adjust. Humankind always does. But we won’t adjust by anxiety over the future or recriminations about the past or by dashing around to stick fingers in the bursting dam of change that’s engulfing us. I wrote before that addressing inequality, focusing on ‘wholeness’ and redefining the role of the manager were topics for the workplace more than fourteen weeks ago and the crisis only brings them to the fore. As it does with Digitisation, Economic Nationalism and those robots that looked so scary before all this but might now be our best productivity bet to meet the debt crisis coming our way.  

Having sprinted to get the crisis response started, now might be the time to understand that it’s a marathon and use our heads and hearts as well as our fingers to meet the challenge. We’re in it for the long haul.