We’ve asked some of our Asian Studies faculty, staff and students to share their experiences on working from home. Events and Digital Media Assistant Connie Wu only began her role at the start of 2020 and continues to meet every challenge with her sunny disposition!
What are some problems you may have encountered during the transition to remote working?
- Lack of connection between colleagues: Working remotely makes communication with co-workers less efficient when emailing becomes the main communication tool that replaces in-person communication. To me, face-to-face communication is a better way to interact with each other and keep each other at the same pace than online messaging.
- Decreased work/life balance: The first few days of working remotely at home makes it hard to balance my work with school work and other tasks, since the used-to-be physical distinction among them no longer exists. Since all kinds of work happen in one place, I need to find a way to reach a balance that prevents distraction when working.
How did you cope with the problems to ease the transition?
- Keep up with work updates between colleagues: As a WorkLearn student, I started to provide an end-of-day work update to my supervisor via email by the end of my every shift. The daily update helps to keep both of us at the same pace and thus makes communication more efficient.
- Create to-do lists of daily tasks: Creating a to-do list allows me to have a clear idea of what I will be doing at work during the shift. It prevents me from missing anything that I need to finish at work so that I can enjoy my free time without worrying about any unfinished work duties.
Describe one new thing (skill, interest, pastime, etc) you may have learned during the quarantine time?
- Color grading skill: I like to do video editing in my spare time for my vlogs. Recently, I spent a few solid hours digging into the color grading tutorials on YouTube and practicing on my videos. Color grading is a time-consuming task to perform in video editing so it was my least favourite thing to do. With more extra time I get during quarantine, I’ve finally found my patience to do it and it is so much fun.
Any medium (music, books, cooking recipe, etc.) you could recommend that you’ve found relaxing/entertaining recently?
- Piano cover of K-Pop playlists by Smyang Piano (YouTube channel). Calm and chill music that I listen to sometimes at work and at school work.
During this time, have you sought/found any words of wisdom or quotes from your particular language area/culture/background that you have found to be particularly comforting, and could share if so?
- “全世界在同一片着了火的森林，人类只有合作、团结、互助才能打败它。”—– 马云
(“We are one with the global community in the intense battle to protect all families against Covid-19.” —- Jack Ma)
As a thank you for your time in answering these questions, is there anything personally you’d like to promote or let everyone know about right now?
- Alibaba’s Jack Ma offers large donations to countries like the U.S., Japan, South Korea and Spain to help the fight against COVID-19.
To read more Inspiration in Isolation stories, click here!
