Being productive

I'd written this blog post on the 4th but am posting it only now...

As the world around us is getting more and more a dangerous place to live in, sometimes we have to retreat into our safe havens.

This week, we have genuinely been too scared to go grocery shopping. With deliveries being unavailable in our area due to high backlogs, we started getting very worried. Our last grocery run had been on March 22nd, so we had gone about 12 days or so with what we bought. We still had enough food to last us a few days. However, we were low on a few of our preferred items and were also unsure about when (or even whether) we would finally get a delivery window. The thought of heading to the grocery store, or rather of my husband going to the grocery store filled me with dread. Covid has been quite prevalent in our area, and we already know of people living in our neighborhood and workers in our nearby stores contracting it.

We heard that Amazon releases its delivery slots at midnight for Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market. We are up at all hours of the night because of the kids, but somehow we were unable to find a delivery slot. I started feeling defeated and like this online grocery buying wasn’t my thing. We have never done online grocery shopping before for our daily needs despite wanting to try it out. There was one time several years ago that I placed a delivery order from Safeway when I used to live alone, and another time when I was on bed rest, and that was it. My husband loves to go choose his own produce and groceries and didn’t like the idea of giving that up (pre Covid). However he was not keen to go to the store now either. We were just not sure whether online ordering would work.

Finally, out of desperation, I googled “when does Whole Foods release delivery slots” and came upon a script on Reddit that runs in the background and alerts you when a slot pops up. Well, I thought I’d give it a try and without bothering to even read the instructions, I downloaded it off GitHub and installed it and managed to get it to work (note: I am not a software developer). A few times, it did alert me about a free delivery slot but by the time I clicked past the items that were out of stock, the window disappeared. Finally, just when I was about to give up, I managed to complete our order! By this time, I had added items back into our cart repeatedly over the past couple of days as they kept disappearing when they went out of stock. So we had no idea what was actually left in our cart and what would eventually arrive.

Just a disclaimer here: delivery slots are few and far between but we don't feel like we were taking away from seniors or people in need. Most of the seniors in our area don't online shop for groceries, and are taken care of by others shopping for them in the community through many volunteers. There are resources in our area for them to sign up for grocery help and the stores have senior hours and senior lines. We have also offered our help to our neighbors. The delivery slots are usually taken by people like us, often by people more savvy in scripting and online shopping. Besides, the script is hit or miss (mostly miss) since it's just a matter of luck when you refresh your page. Slots disappear within seconds so you could run your script for days and never score a slot. 

Our delivery slot happened to be for the same afternoon between 4 and 6 pm. At around 4:10 we got an alert on our Amazon app (that I had only installed for this exercise) that the groceries were dropped off. And voila! We managed to get most of our required groceries for about a week delivered to our doorstep! We have a sanitizing station set up on a folding table in the garage with a clean and dirty half and got to work. It was such a relief. This was probably my “main” accomplishment yesterday. We are ok with stuff for the next few days, until we have to worry about this all over again.

Today brought me back to focus on some of our bank work that needed attention. I also got pulled into an escalation at work. At the same time, my husband got a phone call about an urgent issue at his work. What to do?! We stuck the kids in front of the TV for an hour, grabbed a coffee and got to work, hoping for the best.

I was happy to be productive at work and realized that when I sit at my computer and work on networking stuff, I feel at peace. I feel excited. I want to do more and learn more (until I hear baby crying, and then everything else has to wait). I’ve been living in interrupt mode for so long that it’s become the norm. But these brief pockets of productivity really help me keep my sanity, and make me even look forward to the next interruption from the kids. I felt like a total badass running a Python script to get my groceries delivered!! That was a nice intersection of my home and work worlds.

I remember being on bed rest and leave of absence from my work and wanting the same kind of distraction a couple of years back. I was too scared about my condition at the time to even enjoy watching TV or reading books. I felt like working without the pressure of a deadline, just for the satisfaction that it brings. I had actually emailed my boss and volunteered to do some work, off the record. While it was a bit of a gesture of goodwill, it was really more for me than for my team.

Some things never change, I suppose. We have this idea ingrained into us that work is a "good" type of busy and engaging in hobbies is a "bad" type of busy, something that doesn't really make sense. What if your field of work is something you enjoy doing, as is fortunately my case? Yes, it is not always fun because you're often working under a mismanaged framework. But that is also part of the challenge you may be willing to overcome if you feel inspired by your core work.

Being productive and working really made my day. In other words, while work is what sometimes breaks us down, many times it is also what lifts us up.