I kinda touched on what happened in January 2020 in my last post.. so let's pick it up from there. February was when things started changing because of covid. My previous company (I have joined a new company since September, more on that later) implemented work-from-home arrangement very early, since the management were seeing this might be a long term thing to deal with. Which is accurate.
As a person who has kinda labelled myself as someone who doesn't like to stay at home, I was worried at first. Am I gonna get bored? How much motivation will I have? Is it fun? Those are the concerns early on. I tried many things to get a lil bit of excitement from the wfh arrangement. Preparing healthy food, going to a colleague's house for dinner, doing some workout using the HDB's fitness facility, and even donating blood for the first time (I've tried donating when I was in university, but didn't have enough iron). In retrospect, those are some quite effective coping mechanisms. At least they gave me stuffs to be looking forward to.
You might wonder.. but how about work? Am I not preoccupied with it? Well yes, in normal time work will have those effects. But as we already know.. 2020 is not business as usual. My previous company is a software agency, and the business model involves providing services like development, design, and content (me) to our clients. Not sure how it works exactly, but there might be profit sharing for projects. And during covid, our big clients were impacted heavily. Long story short there were some adjustments made such as benefit freeze, management pay cut, and even shortened work week scheme for employees. For us employees it's not that bad because the plan basically means we're getting paid half day for a full day off.. from a certain angle, it even sounds good.
Ok but that's not the point actually. So, because of the changes that our clients needed to make in their business model, we needed to implement things fast. Product developers worked all day and night to create and integrate products. However for the UX team, these urgent changes meant that UX processes were skipped most of the times. I get it, to be honest. And might even make the same decision if I were the one in charge. But yeah, for me it meant that most of my work was for long term projects that no one knows when they were gonna be implemented since everything else was so urgent at that time. You can see it this way: who will consider renovating a house while the house is on fire?
This situation went on till around March or April I think. The good part of it was that I suddenly had more free time to utilize. So then I started to prepare my portfolio, updated my resume, and even applied to some open positions that I'm interested in. One of them was at Facebook. It's quite a big thing for me because that Content Strategist role actually required 5 years of experience.. while I hadn't even worked for 2 years at that time. But anyway, I gave it a shot. I still remember how passing every interview stages felt super unbelievable. In total there were four stages, I reached the final one, and didn't get the job in the end. A bit disappointed, yes.. but I'm happy that I tried. They were also nice enough to brief me about what were the considerations, and to be honest I see their point. It's regarding something that I believe with more experience and time, I'll be able to improve on.
Ok so now that I've covered the most memorable part of this quarter, let me list down other stuffs that happened:
- Started to read books consistently, mostly about design and writing. While I've always loved reading, I somehow can forget about it during some period. I remember while not reading, I was binge watching some series earlier this year (b99, the good place, kim's convenience, black mirror)
- Had proper Valentine dinner with my partner - the one that you make reservation and get served special set menu. I was very pleased with how nice the staffs were treating us!
- Sent LinkedIn connection request to some content strategists that I admired, instead of just following
- Went back to Medan in March to join my grandpa's 100-days prayer. Was tired most of the days, but had some good time with family too. This has since been my most recent trip to Medan, as covid became widespread soon after.
- Got a new glasses. Not a huge milestone haha, but I'm including this here because I really really like it. It's a different style compared to my previous ones, with semi transparent frame instead of my usual brownish frame picks. I think it looks cool and also "light" haha
- Early January before CNY, I went to Indonesia for a user interview with some colleagues. I was sick for the whole trip.. it's like flu but much worse and I felt terrible tbh. Even after taking medicine, there's this "I can't feel my face" sensation. But amazingly I didn't take any day off, took part in the whole thing, and somehow survived (was it covid? who knows..).
- During this same trip, I was sharing room with 2 of my closest colleagues in that company. To my ultimate absolute surprise, both of them resigned not long after that 😞 In my last year's recap post I mentioned about a colleague who resigned right? Well this time's got me feeling the same haha. I'm happy for them really, but also it felt different without them around. Not only about the vibe, but also what they brought to work, how they care about the product, their expertise, and all that. This might or might not have influenced my consideration to move (serious answer: yes, but it's not like oh they resigned so I wanna resign too. In the end, it sort of gave me room to explore new things at my previous company, to take more responsibility, to consider long term stuffs).
Alright that's all for the first quarter of 2020! It feels more liberating doing this actually, because I don't have to write a whole long recap for the whole year before I can post. This post currently has no pictures because I'm here typing away with my phone, but promise they will come later ✌️
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