IDK who needs to hear this, but adapting to “the new normal” also means adjusting expectations (external and internal) of your performance and productivity to account for the new and at least semi-permanent conditions you’re operating under.

We no longer live in a pre-pandemic society, and just as we cannot expect the same quality of life under pandemic conditions, we also can’t expect the same productivity.

Here’s the part where I get really personal:

The preceding tweets are especially true if you are a high-functioning personality type who is constantly trying to squeeze peak performance out of yourself.

If you push yourself to operate at peak efficiency under “normal” conditions, there’s no way you’re operating with a sustainable workload in “the new normal” where everything costs more energy, and all your recharging mechanisms are in varying states of dysfunction.

We ARE in this for the long-ish haul, now.

We’ve passed the point where this was manageable within a period of months, and are now looking at probably at least a year or two of... this.

You owe it to yourself and everyone around you to figure out how to make it sustainable.

Just in case “how to make it sustainable” wasn’t clear:

You owe it to yourself and everyone around you to re-evaluate what you have capacity for, and prioritize accordingly.

You can’t just “rebalance” the same load without figuring out how to make it light enough to carry.

People keep responding to tweets in this thread with variations of “tell that to my manager,” and tbh I’m a white femme, and am more than happy to use my innate skills for this purpose.

I would LOVE to speak to your manager.

My industry isn’t doing this either, and as someone either gifted or cursed with Future Sight, I am telling people right the fuck now that they need to slow their rolls, or collective burnout is going to manufacture yet another crisis.

And I’m especially saying this to the people I know who are in leadership roles, and who have at least some influence to change expectations for individual workers, because I ALSO know that the pressure being placed on workers right now is unsustainable, and people will break.

A fun-but-depressing thought exercise is to consider how many out-of-work people could be trained to take on the amount of work we need to shift off of those who ARE still employed, how many systemic problems that would solve, and how unlikely it is to actually happen.