Investing your time during the Lockdown

With the current outbreak of COVID-19(Corona-Virus), most of the people are required to stay home to prevent the spreading of the virus, because we were not able to find an effective treatment nor a vaccine. That's why most governments took some safety measures and either ordered residents to stay inside their houses and allowed only to leave at certain times for daily supplies.

And the fact that we cannot leave for work, trips, college, etc. Leaves us with a lot of free time on our hands. We know that most of this time will either be spent on playing video-games or watching the television. But what if we actually invest this time on ourselves?

What can we do with our free-time anyways? Well, the real question is, what can't we do? There are many opportunities we can take; one of them is primarily for students who do not speak English very well. You could watch movies without the subtitles and try to understand what is being said. Or even better, work reading a book or a journal, (the subject isn't necessary because it's for practice only). Lastly, you could use different applications or websites like the Duolingo app, which helps you study a foreign language or even some dictionaries to find out the meaning of some words.

On the other hand, if you want to learn a particular set of skills or if you want to extend your knowledge/proficiency, you could start a blog or a journal regarding your favourite subject or even write poetry.

But if you are not much of a literature person, or if you have different hobbies, then you can polish them instead in case you don't want to learn new things. Most of us were very busy and had little time to care about our hobbies. Now it's a golden chance to go back to them and improve yourself at them. Whether it's drawing, writing, poetry, cooking, knitting, photography, calligraphy, singing or computer programming, it doesn't matter.

And other than hobbies, we can use the time to focus more on our professions. Especially for us, the students of the Computer science department. There are many things that we can learn now, which will help us in the future. Like learning a new programming language or improve your skills in a language you already know or even venture into new branches that we have yet to cover!

For me, I spent a portion of my time improving my writing skills; I mainly focused on poetry and writing short stories which got me interested in new subjects that I used to hate. I also took the time to teach myself a programming language called Python; it's relatively easy and fun to learn but has excellent potential once you know your way around it.

Now, I'm not saying we should devote all our free time, of course not. But that also doesn't mean we only give it a small portion too. A good time would be from two to three hours a day.

The point is, we can do more than we think we could. It all depends on how we manage our time and schedule. And those who do invest their time will be highly rewarded with the improvement of their skills and the new knowledge they gained.

This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for us. So, let's not waste it and get the most out of it. And most importantly, stay home and safe and follow the medical instructions given to us by the government.