5 great tips for turning that lockdown into a lockUP or something

1) Get a hobby

hobby
noun
noun: hobby; plural noun: hobbies
1.
an activity done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure.
“her hobbies are reading and gardening”

I’ve read that definition countless times, and clearly drinking counts. If not, researching what drink to order definitely does. Other hobbies of note include copying and pasting definitions from online dictionaries, and teaching yourself to sneeze into your elbows. Get creative! Jigsaws don’t count though. Sorry, I don’t make the rules. (I do make the rules.)

2) Challenge yourself

An enforced lockdown can be turned into a positive. Think of all the time you have on your hands to better yourself, to become the person you always felt you could be.

Speaking of hands, one such challenge is to allow yourself to think about how often you used to touch your face, and then attempt to last 15 seconds without then doing it. Picking your nose sure sounds good right about now too, huh?

3) Read!

All those novels you’ve vaguely pretended to have read when speaking to someone at a party.

Those self-help books to enable you to get on top of your anxiety, to exude the confidence you just know is there somewhere, buried under the rubble of your pointless insecurities.

Books to help you get your career to exactly where you want it to be.

You won’t read any of them. Stop pretending you will. You hate books, they’re boring.

4) Set yourself goals

Goals are vital. We all need them. They can be small, daily tasks like actually getting out of bed in the morning, or having a shower. Or they can be ways of dividing your working day into manageable tasks. If you’re like me you’ll fail spectacularly at every turn, but at least you will have succeeded in growing your self-loathing exponentially, so if you set that as your goal then you’re quids in.

5) Write something

You could write that novel you’ve always said you’d write if you had the time. Except we all know you won’t do that; we’ve already established you hate books.

So why not try a list-based article. They’re fun, right? And everyone loves them don’t they?

Some might think that lists themselves are akin to a virus, causing nothing but harm, sucking something from every one of us as we pass it on to others without thinking.

They might also say that these (tough, unprecedented) times should force us to raise our standards, to demand more from our writers and ourselves.

To push for something more concerned with engaging and educating an audience, to strive to make their world a better place rather than just something to absent-mindedly share.

And to those people I say this: writing something good is really hard, and writing lists is really easy. Besides, to paraphrase the great A. Partridge: ‘people like them, so let’s write more of them’.