A thoughtful piece about dealing with the current crisis:
Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure.

While written from an academic perspective, it has what I think is valuable advice for lots of us. It was forwarded to me as part of a group of people with family connections to the 27 OCT 2018 shootings at the synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Big Al

Just passed this along to a friend at Harvard Business School.

Thanks, big al.

I'm still charging hard on the productivity thing, even though I think that the article is correct that we shouldn't be putting pressure on ourselves. It's just that work is an anxiety-reliever for me.

It would be different if we had kids at home. I think families with young children should just do the absolute minimum. They need to keep their stress down so that their kids' stress will stay as low as possible. Otherwise, we're going to have a lot of traumatized adults in ten or twenty years.

So...I'm teaching my online classes. I'm working on a paper that a journal asked me to revise. I'm working on a proposal for a reference book on Agatha Christie. And when those things have been flung to the appropriate editors, there's a proposal for a standalone novel that I want to work on.

All of these things will go completely out the window if any of my loved ones gets sick, but working on them staves off the fear that it will happen.