Kimberley Goode, senior vice president of external affairs at Blue Shield of California, described what it's been like for her to deal with the pandemic during the last year. In a story published March 18 in the Central Valley Voice, Goode talked about the four generations of women in her family and how she appreciated the time she had with her family.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the biggest adjustment came when Goode’s employer shifted all but essential office workers to work from home full time in March of 2020. When that shift began, Goode started working at her dining room table, competing with family members for WiFi and trying to keep the home quiet while navigating video calls with coworkers.
She also had to take on caregiving duties, assisting her 75-year-old mother and her 95-year-old grandmother to avoid the risks of having home-health worker visits. That meant squeezing in meal planning and medication distribution between work meetings and taking on responsibility for helping her grandmother get dressed and ready for the day.
“Becoming a hands-on elder caregiver required me to coordinate my calendar to manage both home and work responsibilities,” Goode says. “It meant planning for quick breaks throughout the day to step away from work to do what was needed at home.”
After a few months, it became clear that she would not be returning to the office any time soon, and home and work were colliding.
To get her arms around everything on her plate, Goode needed to establish a more permanent workspace with separation from home life and more organizing tools. She ordered a whiteboard to keep track of projects, borrowed her grandmother’s antique desk and set it up in the corner of the living room. Her new workspace is flanked by two windows that provide natural light and a bird’s eye view of package deliveries, now that most shopping is being done online.
Read the full story here.