Standing Out in a Sea of (coronavirus) Noise

There’s a lot of ‘noise’ in the world right now. It seems everyone has advice about something. 

Mostly, it’s been about how to work from home. The moment every remote worker has waited for. 

LinkedIn feeds are full of tips and articles. If you still don’t know how to work from home, you must be living under a rock.

Every CEO of every company on the planet felt it necessary to seemingly copy, paste, and send the same email to everyone about their response to the virus. 

People who have never worked from home, despite the ‘great’ advice that exists everywhere you turn are still trying to get their bearings and figure it all out. They also may have kids, a spouse, or a roommate to contend with. 

We have daily news updates from the President followed by grim news story after grim news story. 

Some people are addicted to the news. They’ll watch it all day, even if the news doesn’t change. 

People who have never gone on walks are now out on the paths. 

People are distracted now more than ever. When we thought people’s attention couldn’t possibly get more scarce, it up and became more scarce. 

What does that mean for us? For those of us writing something every day or every week and putting it out into a world full of noise? 

I’m asking because I don’t know. I keep writing, publishing and sharing it out. Maybe now is the right time for me to pull back a little from other things (Resistance) and focus on writing a book. Let the noise abate (Resistance). 

Or maybe I do both. Continue writing a blog post every week. Publish it. Share it. Move on. What sticks will stick. If it doesn’t, then I wrote for an audience of one- me. 

Sometimes I get excited about writing a book. I think I have a good topic. Then Resistance steps in, mostly in the form of planning and trying to predict the future. If I already feel overwhelmed with what’s on my plate, I can’t possibly add something else. It’s time to re-prioritize and cut some things.

The same conclusion that I came to yesterday when thinking about things. I think it’s pruning time.