My musings/writings/learnings
Even after the lockdown ends, I hope people continue to stay inside more with their loved ones rather than always trying to get from here to there.
Staying with loved one’s won’t ensure a thriving country
See. I think you’re understanding me just a slight bit wrong.
I am not asking you to keep everything shut permanently. I want to travel, just like many others. I want to enjoy a meal outside, just like the rest of us. There’s this whole class of people that need to go outside for work. I am not asking them to find new work and re-skill themselves. That’s absolutely crushing for everyone involved.
What I am hinting towards is the amount of businesses that have shown they can function just as well while being location agnostic. All those people that were strongly opposing work from home and other remote policies saying that they need to share the same physical location to be productive. While that is true for certain business roles, this lock-down has shown it’s a myth for a majority of us. We are adapting. Companies are coming up incredible and innovative ways to keep a tab on the work being done. People had reported that this quarantine is driving them crazy. But look how that has changed after the first few weeks. People are now reporting that they are more productive. They have figured out how to balance work and life.
Not just that, think about what this does in the near future. People who we were not recruiting because our offices didn’t share their location. Or they were physically incapable of moving about. The blind, deaf and certain amputees can type and communicate just like everyone else. There are myriad of options to enable a workforce which had so much to lose because of nonexistent remote possibilities. Video chats, screen readers and especially adapted computer tools (obviously, live captioning add-ons for video/audio meetings) are so widely available and have been in development and improvement phase for years now. We have to be thankful to people for advancements in bio-technology. There are incredible people working on them. It’s a question of adaption, and that’s a when and not an if anymore. Human-computer interaction is only going to benefit from the lockdown and as we continue to include a more and more diversified workforce.
And let not just focus computers and software. But computer enabled mechanical attachments for physical labour. Robotics and IoT for performing tasks remotely. The possibilities are endless. And we should not lose hope.
But what about ancillary needs? Well, focus on supply chain. We’ve been doing that for past several centuries. And we have innovated our way through as the lifestyles and needs changed. Supply chain has defined certain lifestyles that we didn’t even think of as a possibility. Now is the time to hit a pause and innovate again. This is the thing that will keep the engine of the economy running. That is what is keeping it runnig to whatever extent it is at the moment.
Look, it’s not gonna be easy, and it will take some time before we can get back on our feet, up and running again. And yes, not all of us are equipped, conditioned and skilled enough to innovate for the greater good. But we can, and we should, start with many things for the smaller community. You don’t know what will stick. We just have make sure we keep doing our bit. That means, either helping others out by creating, adapting and sharing new ways of working.
I know I am just a starry eyed optimist that wishes for such a beautiful world. But you gotta open your minds to new ways of life. And accept, as you have in the past, that this is the only way we move forward and rise up again. Innovation is stifled by lack of adaptation and awareness. Don’t let yourself be the bottleneck. That’s it.
It’s time we give up the ‘me, myself and I’ mindset and go to the ‘about us, for us and by us’ mindset.