A PhD can already be like walking in the desert alone for many years. The lockdown compounds that isolation. Here are some habits I picked up during my PhD that I've also been deploying during lockdown. Thread: https://twitter.com/sendgoodcheers/status/1250221018242842624

To me, fighting isolation is all about building up the right community around you:
Be intentional about building community with people you work with, even if not direct collaborators.
Be intentional about building a community where nobody talks to you about your work.

When I was in grad school, my cohort of grad students in with in my area were some of my best friends. We yelled together about bad meetings, debugged together, and read each others' drafts. But it took time and the effort and effort to build that trust over the years.

Similarly, I had a group of good friends outside CS that I built up over the years. There were years when I wouldn't go a week without seeing one of them--and being able to decompress with people who understood my life, but who I didn't talk to about work, was great for sanity.

But building up my communities took a lot of work! Finding the right non-CS community took years of showing up to events and having lunch and coffee with people I had just met. I built @gwamitweb in part to make friends.

I've learned that if I don't want to fell isolated during lockdown, I'll need to put in the work. I've been scheduling evening catch-ups with friends, even when I feel like I have too much work. This is also a big part of why I've been working on http://jeandate.com .

I should acknowledge that it is an incredible privilege to have social isolation be one of my bigger concerns. But for everybody else for whom that's the case: this is a friendly reminder that community isn't something that just happens--you need to put in the work!