March 11, 2020: Remote Schooling In China; Coronavirus Update; Transitioning To WFH
Good morning,
I’m still not happy with yesterday’s article, it took far too long to write and parts of it feel sloppy. Perhaps I am still transitioning into the habits needed to write these updates.
In comparison, I hope you find today’s update full of interesting news & WFH mindfulness.
Remote Schooling In China
In the US, most schools remain open even as businesses have started to close. In China, however, schools have been closed for over a month. This gives us a wonderful opportunity to observe what has happened to schooling in China and predict the future of what might happen in the US.
Based on conversations with contacts in China and the latest news articles, it seems like a few big things are happening:
Schools are closed, but the government has mandated that education must continue.
This has lead to a massive rush to online schooling, even though the current options are awful in parents’ eyes. (I’ve heard something like 90% of students now have online “accounts”, up from something like 10% at the start of the year)
The remote school apps can’t handle the load, and so schools have started using video live streaming platforms like 快手 and 豆瓣 (basically Chinese TikTok) and plain old broadcast TV(!!!) because they’re already built for scale.
Left: A university student watching an online lesson; Center: An online lesson with the “comments stream” from students below; Right: An in-app page that shows links for elementary and middle school grades.
The current workflow is rudimentary. Teachers send lecture links and worksheets as wechat attachments, which parents then print out at home (lots of new printers being sold). Kids watch lectures on their phones, and then fill out the worksheets. Parents snap photos of the worksheets and use wechat to send them back to teachers for grading.
The product manager in me is just craving to improve this workflow, but surprisingly the current rough state seems to be working. It will be very interesting to see what happens as schools reopen. Will this online trend continue, or will things mostly revert to normal?
If you want to read more, check out these articles: 1, 2, 3, 4 (all in Chinese but the automatic google translations are decent).
Coronavirus Update
At this point, it seems likely that this coronavirus is uncontainable. However, that does not mean that containment efforts should be abandoned. On the contrary, efforts to slow transmission also have the effect of spreading out the cases over time, so that existing hospital infrastructure has a better chance at not being overwhelmed.
From JAMA,
Taiwan is 81 miles off the coast of mainland China and was expected to have the second highest number of cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) due to its proximity to and number of flights between China.
And yet Taiwan has had remarkably few cases, only 47 from a population of 23 million citizens. Compare that to Italy which has 9172 cases from a population of 60 million.
Why? The smoking gun seems to be Taiwan’s response, which involved preemptively canceling school and taking proactive actions as the JAMA article details:
those with higher risk (recent travel to level 3 alert areas) were quarantined at home and tracked through their mobile phone to ensure that they remained at home during the incubation period.
Moreover, Taiwan enhanced COVID-19 case finding by proactively seeking out patients with severe respiratory symptoms (based on information from the National Health Insurance [NHI] database) who had tested negative for influenza and retested them for COVID-19
Because of how viruses spread exponentially, taking actions to disrupt that growth rate just a few days sooner can result in a truly massive slowdown in transmission. At this point, I wish I were in Taiwan. Here in SF, schools are still open and everyone is mostly going about their normal business, a recipe for viral spread.
It also helps that Taiwan has a national healthcare system where people are used to going to the hospital for even the most minor things. In my 3 months there in 2016, I had to take a friend to the emergency room in the middle of the night not once but twice, and I was stunned by a) how many people were there for seemingly minor things, b) how efficiently everything was handled, and c) how insanely cheap the visits were ($30 for an overnight stay, IV, and meds).
By the time you read this, the US will surely be past 600 cases. In Italy, 600 cases turned into 3000 in just 6 days and then 6000 in just 3 more days. With our growth rate (doubling every 2-3 days), we seem likely to have over 10,000 confirmed cases in the USA by the end of next week and 100,000 by the end of March.
And that is why you need to WFH.
Transitioning to WFH
If you’re struggling to work from home this week, you’re not alone, many people are experiencing their first full week of WFH.
In addition to creating a workspace, routine, and plan for getting unstuck, it can be helpful to think of work as a series of habits. You’ve probably already read The Power Of Habit, but in case you haven’t, the relevant insights are:
Willpower is limited.
Habits are automatic and don’t take willpower.
Habits can be created and changed with time and effort.
The key parts of every habit are the cue, routine, and reward.
So how does this apply to working from home? If you’ve just started working from home, this has probably broken many of your working from work habits. For example:
Walking into the office as a cue to sit down and get started.
A coworker passing by in the hallway as a cue to stand up and take a break, while also possibly learning something in the process.
Returning from the bathroom, the sight of everyone else working as a cue for you to get back to work.
Seeing your coworkers chatting as a cue to catch up with them and learn how their work is going.
Eating lunch with coworkers as a reward for getting good work done in the morning.
Going to the coffee machine as a reward after sitting focused for an hour.
Leaving the office at the end of the day as a reward for wrapping up the last things that need to get done that day.
Seeing your coworker’s excitement as a reward for collaboratively sketching out a solution together.
These are just some examples, I’m sure if you spend a few minutes you can extend this list with your own habits.
Ok, habits are broken, so what? So these are preventing you from working from home effectively. Repair your habits with WFH cues and rewards. For example:
Walk out of the house, then back into the house, then shut your “office” door as the new cue for getting started working.
Create an alarm as a cue to look over your team list and reach out to someone to ask them how things are going.
Print a photo of your coworkers with their headphones on and stick it up on your workspace as a cue to get back to work for when you return from the bathroom.
Make WFH lunch fun rather than stressful to reward yourself for a good morning of work.
Find some creative short breaks like watering your plants (if you’re a green thumb like me) or making a matcha latte at home and only take these breaks as rewards for specific routines like writing up a document, or debugging a piece of code.
Reward yourself for wrapping up work at the end of the day by leaving the office and enjoying the fresh air for a bit, or perhaps listening to some of your favorite music, or going to see a friend, or making dinner with your partner.
Make your coworker’s excitement visible by video chatting with them so that their excitement can be the reward for collaborating together.
Ok, so if the good news is that habits are changeable, the bad news is that it takes something like 30 days to fully establish a new habit. And in the meantime, forming these habits takes lots of willpower.
So if you find yourself struggling with willpower, reduce your focus to just one or two habits. Maybe just start with the cue for getting started in the morning and rewarding yourself for wrapping up work at the end of the day. Nail those, and only then layer in more habits.
WFH Laugh of the day
From a friend:
Thanks for reading, now get back to work!
See you tomorrow,
Andrew