Ways to Kill Our Boredom During Home Quarantine

As this new type of corona virus, Covid19, compels us to stay at home longer to avoid the risk of getting sick and to not spread the virus ourselves, why not make good use of these abundant & precious time we have now. Here are some suggestions on how to kill our boredom and make our quarantine days worthwhile and productive.

There are basically 3 things we can do during our home quarantine which are but not limited to as follows;

a. Home Improvement

b. Self Improvement

c. Looking at Overlooked Things

Apart from the general house cleaning which many of us have already done, there are still more ways to make our home not only the safest place to stay because it’s the cleanest but it’s also our most comfortable zone as well.

1) Rearranging our furnitures, fixtures, equipments & tools in our home areas - living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom, laundry area and yes even in the comfort room.

This is a good time to think of other arrangements that can create more open spaces so we can move around our house with more ease and comfort.

What rearrangement can we do;

• Moving or removing things we don’t need in that particular area that can allow us to maximize the floor space & other spaces that could be used better for other things or purposes. Identify which things are cluttering the area & store them aside. Later, when social contact can be made, we may donate or sell them so others can make better use of them. There is a saying that "a one man’s trash could be another man’s treasure".

• Rearranging or moving furnitures & fixtures where their purpose can be serve better.

Like do we really need that lampshade in there or it is needed more in other dark corners of our house.

• Maximize the corners and the spaces under and over.

Check if there are areas in your house that are left unutilized, like the back of doors, corners and empty areas where we don’t usually walk. Unload the crowded areas of our house and use that available hidden space.

• Reorganize things inside the cabinets, drawers & closets.

If we reorganize things around a particular area of our house, we can easily get access to things or easily find things when we need them.

For example in our bedroom, we might be surprised how much space we can have when we reorganize our closets and drawers to remove clothes that we no longer wear or just can’t wear anymore. There may be some old clothes we can no longer wear because it’s no longer appropriate to wear for our age. Some clothes no longer fit us as we may already gain or lose a lot of weight and we find it hard to fit on those clothes which either become too tight or too loose for us now. Or there maybe some clothes that we just don’t want to wear anymore.

What can we do with those clothes?

We may donate these clothes to people who have been victims of fire or to charitable institutions who are helping people of our age or homeless people in the streets.

With some know-how in sewing, we can repair/redesign our old clothes to a different style or form so we can wear them again with a new refreshing look.

2) Do some repairs & renovations.

If we have some paints & varnish left, we can check some areas of our house that needs repainting or varnishing. Repainting/varnishing things at home makes an old one looks new.

Some repairs may only need a hammer & some nails, so pull out your tool box and fix some broken things which can still be put into good use.

We can also make good use of Youtube tutorial videos to repair non-electrical items and damaged/broken parts of our house.

3. Sow & grow some vegetables, fruit-bearing or flower-bearing plants.

If our backyard has enough space to accommodate some growing plants & vegetables, why not. If we have planted before, we should be harvesting now the fruits of our labor (literally). This is useful especially during this pandemic crisis when we have to minimize spending & live within our remaining cash fund as many of us have stopped working or have stopped business operation.

If not, there are still a lot of plants & vegetables which we can grow & harvest in a short time. Please see video below.

Growing our food in our own backyard is the best habit we can ever form as we are producing another food source which is basically essential to our survival. Plants help reduce the carbon dioxide & other pollutant gases in the air, making the oxygen we breathe cleaner, fresher & safer. Planting is a good stress reliever too.

It would be wonderful if we can share our harvest with our relatives, friends, neighbors but most especially to hungry people in the streets.

4) Do maintenance work on one’s vehicle.

Check what our vehicle needs, aside from interior & exterior cleaning, perhaps we need to change oil, change tire, replace the break pads, etcetera. We might not be able to buy maintenance items at this time, but at the time that we are able to go and buy the necessary, we already know exactly what we need to keep our vehicle running safe and at utmost performance.

5) Self awareness and self realization.

We now have a lot of time to evaluate ourselves, reset our goals & review/re-arrange our plans to make our future self and our lives better than ever.

We may ask ourselves these questions as a self-evaluation technique;

- Are you happy with what have you done so far to make your life better?

- Are you at peace with yourself? Are you satisfied with your career? Are you achieving your life goals?

- Analyze if you have made any mistakes in the past and if you have already corrected them or if you are constantly repeating the same mistake. What can you do to not commit the same error over & over again?

- Check an area in your life where you feel unhappy & do something about it. Is it family problems, work, friends?

If it’s a family problem, can you think of a solution both short-term and long-term.

If it’s work, do you need a career shift, do you need to study another skill?

If it’s friends, perhaps it 's time to ditch some old friends that do nothing but criticize and see people & situations negatively. We need to be surrounded by positive people to make a positive change in our life. People who will support and motivate us to become a better person. People who will be happy to see us achieve what we’ve worked hard for. Friends who are jealous/envious of our achievements, success & happiness are not really friends but just mere acquaintances.

6) Enhance our current skill/s.

If we are already good at something, now is the perfect time to be better, if not one of the best.

Learn how to improve one's craft like use the internet to do research on famous people specializing in the particular field we're in and find inspiration and motivation from them on how they've become successful and how we can do better than what we can now.

7) Learn something new.

Our learning shouldn’t stop after college, it is actually a lifelong task. Don’t you know that keeping our brain cells active may help us minimize our risk to Alzheimer’s disease. Please check out below reference links;

https://www.nwphysicians.com/strengthen-brain-health-to-help-avoid-alzheimer-s-symptoms/

https://www.cambridgecognition.com/blog/entry/7-ways-to-reduce-the-risk-of-alzheimers-disease

https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/preventing-alzheimers-disease-what-do-we-know

If we want to improve and reinvent ourselves, learning new things is one of the best way.

What to learn?

a. Another way of earning a living.

Since many of us cannot go to work or operate our small businesses, we need to find an alternative way to make a decent money for us to afford our daily necessities.

Online or work from home jobs have been around for a couple of decades now and home-based freelance workers have been continuously increasing in the recent years. This type of job is very convenient for single mothers who can't leave their young children at home and for people with leg/foot injuries/disabilities.

If we'll just do some research, we can find work from home opportunities online. Try to check Jobstreet,com, Monster.com, Upwork, Outsourcely, Freelancer.Com, PeoplePerHour, Guru.Com, Fiverr, VIpKid , LiveOps, Konversai, Rev & a lot more, just beware of scammers online.

b. Cooking or baking (in case you still didn't know how).

I know some ladies in their mid 20's and yet they still didn't know how to cook simple dishes, much more the festive ones.

I also know some guys who know how to cook, are very domesticated and I admire them.

I've learned how to cook at a young age and only on my own by watching cooking shows and reading recipes. I couldn't rely on my mother to teach me as she has no interest or passion for cooking.

Learning to cook our own food is a basic survival skill, we can't always rely on others to do things for us. It is also very costly to always dine out. If we want to save some money, better learn to cook now.

c. A new skill

Our choice, depending on our area of interest.

If it's in music, learn to improve singing or how to play one musical instrument. If it's in arts, perhaps painting, interior design, graphic design etc.

One of the best thing is that the internet is an online encyclopedia of all things. We just have to pick the right and reliable source out of hundreds of thousands out there.

d. A new language

If we have a current or future plan to visit other countries, would it be nice if we can speak and understand some basic words & sentences. As not everyone in other countries can speak English, so we will be the one to adjust to them, we being the tourist.

We may also take learning foreign language seriously and make a career out of it.

Customer Service Representatives speaking foreign languages earn higher salaries than speaking their own language. We may also work as interpreter or translator or tourist guide.

Check out a few videos here of polygots to inspire us, not necessarily to be a polygot ourselves but by their amazing effort to be able to learn a different language & even the accent as well. Amazing, isn't it?

e. DIYs and How to's.

Learn as many DIY's & How To's as we can.

Learning to do and create things on our own will bring you us sense of fulfillment & independence as we become self-reliant or self-sufficient on many things. Doing things on our own allows us to cut on our household or personal expenses so we can buy more of your necessities.

f. To do things without electricity or modern technology

We sometimes, if not often, experience power outage at home which could be inconvenient for many of us who have been used to living the "urban life". However, people in rural areas will most probably have no problems with power outage issue as they have been living without electricity and modern technology in the past.

If there's no electricity, we can't use your electric stove or induction cooker or rice cooker to cook our meals. People in urban areas will most probably just call food chains or restaurants for a food delivery. Okay, meal problem solved. Other things can wait until electricity is back.

Learning to do things without electricity and modern technology are needed as a survival skill in the following scenarios;

1) Emergency situations

2) Prolong electricity & water outage as a result of natural disasters & fortuitous events.

it's best to be prepared in situations like these.

Meet Li Ziqi, she is a perfect example of a young person who knows very well how to live comfortably & happily in the countryside. She left the urban area to take care of her grandmother and to live a life she wanted.

She is a 29 year old Chinese woman, who has 9.05 million Youtube subscribers as of March 2020 and a total of 1.1 billion views. Her mainland audience are mostly urban millennials. She is famous for creating food in a traditional way and making handicrafts, household & personal items basically from scratch using her own bare hands.

g. Essential Survival Skills

Aside from cooking, driving, swimming and martial arts skill, there are other survival skills we can still try to learn which can be very useful in today's dangerous world.

Such are;

1) Self-defense skills

Learn techniques & maneuvers to outwit and escape from an attacker/offender.

2) Primitive survival skills

Learn how to start a fire without using a fire match, lighter or fire starters, how to find water from other sources other than your faucet. Stuff like what people do when camping or moutain climbing and they're out of resources. Imagine what will you do if you're stuck in an island, in the wilderness or in some unfamiliar places.

3) Critical survival skills

Practise one's critical thinking skills and preparednes in responding to emergency situations like what one should do if left alone in the house & battling between life & death (heart attack, an intruder hurt you, or you accidentally hurt yourself).

Learn how to put off a fire, protect yourself from fire and escape from a burining house or building.

Learn how to survive during a flashflood, earthquake, tornado, super typhoon or hurricane & other natural disasters.

Learn to improvise things through available resources.

8. Work Out

I know a lot of us are doing this already, but I just want to encourage others who haven't have the motivation yet to do so.

t's very easy to gain weight when we stay at home as we don't have much movement especially with what we do to entertain ourselves. Some are mostly sitting in the couch or lying in bed binging into their favorite snacks while marathon watching movies or TV series. We even have a checklist of what to watch in Netflix, Iflix, Viu or Hulu.

I'm not saying that we should remove this amusing activities that we do, I think it's what keeping us sane & stress-free at this time with all those quarantine-dilemna & all the negativity we see in social media sites especially on Facebook. I just mean to suggest that we could squeeze it in given the time we have now to start a good healthy habit like home work outs.

It's easier & more convenient to slack off than to push ourselfves to work out because we hate sweating. Believe me, I hate sweating too but let's just remind ourselves that those sweats are toxins & dissolved fats that we are trying to get out of our system.

Let's not forget that health is wealth. Why, it's too expensive to get sick, medicines & hospital fees are costly. Even if we have saved enough funds for our emergency expenses, it can easily get depleted once we have just one critical illness. Most critical illness affect and damage other organs too as their functions are all related.

It takes a lot of motivation, patience, discipline & consistency to remain as a healthy person we want to be. But we get to enjoy the things we love to do for longer when we have a healthier lifestyle.

We can lose some weight if we make the right food choices but if we want to have a fit, lean, toned body, proper diet is not enough.

Please see below video to know how to lose weight according to our body type.

9. Proper Storage of Important Papers/Documents

We need to separate & store important original documents safely like medical records, land titles, vehicle registration, stock certificate, bonds certificate & other documents of financial investments & properties, diploma & graduation certificates, payment receipts for purchases with warranty and other important documents. They should be kept in a plastic envelope (poly expanding file holder) and put them inside a resealable zip lock bag (if what you have has no zipper lock) to avoid them being accidentally damaged by water. We should put labels on the tabs for easier identification. Please see sample below.

Others have vaults in their homes like this one which you can buy at Amazon.

Either of which, we should store them in an easily accessible area (for us, not for the robber) in a drawer within our reach so we can easily get them in case of fire & flood.

10. Phone/Computer/Email Inboxes & Online Drive Storage Maintenance

Whether it's a phone, sd card, usb, computer, external hard drive & online storage space, all of it has it's storage limit. We don't want to miss out an importail email in our inbox. We don't want not to be able to take photos or videos of memorable people & events because our phone & SD card's memory are already full. We want to make sure that we can keep all that matters to us.

How can we free some space in our phone/computer/email/storage devices and use their storage space wisely;

• Delete messages in our phone & email inboxes that are no longer current or relevant.
• Transfer all HD images & videos to an external disk drive as these consume bigger storage space that can easily max out our phone & SD card memory.
• All phone contacts should be saved in our sim cards. When our phone suddently broke, we still have our contacts in our sim cards which we can use in our new/replacement phones. Make a back up copy of our contacts in our google drive or other online storage space.
• Save mobile app data in our SD card not in phone memory because they too have a bigger byte size.
• Online storage space like Google Drive, One Drive or MyCloud are best utilized only for very important files as our file copies in our phone, computer & USB are prone to viruses.
• Ensure that our computer have an updated anti-virus software to protect our valuable files & data.
• Unsubscribe from newsletters & email subscriptions that are flooding our email inboxes. Just bookmark the websites & visit them when we have time.
• Sort which emails are important and not then create folders in our inboxes & label them accordingly. In yahoo mail, there is a mail setting where we can program an email from a certain sender be automatically moved to a particular folder.
• If we need to register in a certain website in order to access its content but we don't have plans to subscribe or register permanently with them, Yahoo mail have a feature where we can create a temporary/disposable email address.