Week 68 — Stories of Burnout
As Parts of Ontario Re-Open, COVID-19 Burnout Takes Hold
This past week has been a blur of work, toddler raising and used car shopping. That’s right, I’m in the market for a used car. My partner and I are looking into buying a used electric car. It has been a flurry of getting quotes for insurance, checking the market, selling our own car. This is on top of regular life obligations so it’s a lot to do all at once.
I’ve written in past weeknotes about my experiences and struggles of being a full time working parent with a toddler during a global pandemic. It’s not easy. This week I want to take some time up-front to talk about the impact COVID-19 is having on working parents especially as lockdown restrictions begin to be lifted and life partially returns to normal or as normal as it can during a global pandemic.
Many parts of Ontario have recently moved to “level 2” which allows for most businesses to open. This means a lot of people who were forced to stay home and who couldn’t work from home must now start returning to work. On top of that, day cares have re-opened though with smaller number of spots. For many parents with kids who are not school-aged, this means life can somewhat return to normal in the sense that their kids can go into daycare and their parents can return to normal working hours whether that is at home or in the office. On the surface, this seems like a good development but there is more than meets the eye.
Day care centres are not opening at full capacity. This means many parents will find that they cannot send their kids to day care because day cares do not have spots for all the children. For many parents, this means continuing the delicate and stressful balance of working from home and looking after young children. For those who have daycare spots, there is the lingering fear that their kid could be exposed to COVID-19 and bring it home. Of course, for those with school aged children, schools remain closed in Ontario and with summer camps having limited day only spots, there doesn’t seem to be respite in the near future.
As I’ve said in past weeknotes, this is not normal nor have we created a “new normal”. We are trying to work while living through a once in a 100 year global health pandemic and trying to be awesome parents all at once. We can forgive ourselves for not being perfect either as a parent or employee. So even as Ontario opens up, more parents return to work, some are able to secure limited daycare spots but many more face many more months of kids at home while trying to work, there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.
Burnout becomes a real threat to working parents. We are not teachers, parents and full time employees. This is not what anyone signed up for. We are getting no respite. We are tired. We are burned out. For those lucky enough to have social bubbles (e.g. strong social connections with family and friends) there could be an opportunity to get some respite (break) from kids. More than likely, it will be limited and fleeting.
Without an end in sight, we need to start thinking of what the lasting impact is going to be on working parents. Do we come out the other side of COVID-19 mentally healthy? What is going to be the lasting impact of this on parents? I wish I could say there is an easy solution. There isn’t. But policymakers and politicians alike should start considering how we can support parents in the future through crises like this. Can we make mental health support more accessible to get people through tough times?
AI Demonstrator Projects (Regulatory Metadata, Regulatory Evaluation Platform, Rules as Code and Machine Readable Regulatory Impact Analysis Statement)
Regulatory Metadata: We have started to explore how we can automate the labeling of regulatory metadata. We have a few ideas but nothing concrete yet.
Regulatory Evaluation Platform: We have a meeting with our partners next week to discuss the scope for the next phase of this project. Our focus is on improving the UX/UI of the platform, improve the modernization calculation (e.g. how outdated is the regulation) and improve the similarity and duplication calculation (e.g. how similar is this regulation to this other regulation).
Rules as Code: We have a meeting with our key partner next week to discuss our project charter. I can’t reveal the details yet of the project but as we finalize the scope and plans for the next phase of Rules as Code I will share more. All of that to say, if plans stick then in the fall we will be in the drafting room drafting a regulation in code while we draft in English and French.
Machine Readable Regulatory Impact Analysis Statement: We have some initial ideas of how to improve the publication pipeline and the data structure for how Canada Gazette is published. One of the interesting things about demonstration projects is the intentional scoping to be experimental and exploratory which gives us freedom to try innovative and radical ideas. Nothing is off the table. While we want to see our ideas scale, we aren’t constrained by the usual government IT project restrictions.
Thank you for reading the week 68 weeknotes. When I started the weeknotes I did not expect to make it to week 68 but here we are!
