5 Ways to Keep Yourself Occupied While You and Your Family Are Stuck at Home

As of this moment, huge numbers of people worldwide find themselves stuck at home for an indefinite period of quarantine, due to the global COVID-19 pandemic.

For just about everyone – but especially perhaps for people with young families – being stuck at home indefinitely can be understandably taxing and stressful, and can lead to agitation, restlessness, boredom, and a variety of other undesirable states of being.

Fortunately, there are plenty of things that you can do in order to keep yourself (and your loved ones) occupied, while you are stranded at home.

Here are just a few suggestions.

Make a list of professional and entrepreneurial ideas, and work on a side hustle or skill set

There’s a good chance that you already have various work-related matters to take care of while in self-isolation, including, potentially, things like oracle forms migration that can be done in an entirely digital context.

But outside of the things you might have to do for your day job, being stranded at home for a prolonged period of time gives you a good opportunity to begin exploring some entrepreneurial ideas and side hustles that you might have had in your mind for some time, but that you haven’t yet made work of.

You can begin by making a list of professional and entrepreneurial ideas that you might potentially want to explore, and then investigating just what it would entail to take the first step down the path of exploring one or more of those ideas.

Or, maybe there’s a particular skill set that you would like to develop and become more proficient with, in order to be more effective at the work you are already doing, or as a means of opening the door to other possibilities further down the line.

In any case, it’s only by taking action that you will achieve your dreams and turn your goals and aspirations into a reality – and this might be a good time to start taking some of those initial actions.

Play family board games

If you and your family are stranded together under one roof, making time for regular family boardgames, for example, could significantly reduce the overall stress and tension in the household, while also giving everyone involved some regular and much-needed social engagement. Just try not to let tempers get too heated during the game.

There are all sorts of different boardgames out there that can keep the whole family occupied for hours at a stretch – or that can even be drawn at over a period of days, if that’s the way you want to do things.

Popular options include games like Monopoly, The Settlers of Catan, and Risk. Then, there are more modern and fast-paced games such as Exploding Kittens. Or, you could try your hand at a variety of card games, or even have a go at certain games that rely entirely on the imagination – like charades.

Play video games in moderation

If you are at home without a lot of external stimulation, you might find yourself getting bored and preoccupied pretty quickly, and from there heading towards a state of general-purpose agitation and irritation.

One highly immersive form of entertainment that might help to break the monotony and keep you and the other members of your family engaged, is video games – which exist in a wide variety of different formats, and which can whisk you away to fantastical worlds and engaging storylines in mere moments.

Of course, video games should be played in moderation, and you should be cautious about the kind of games you decide to play, or to let your kids play. Video game addiction is a growing problem, and online games, in particular, seem to have the most detrimental overall effect – both in terms of things like cyber abuse and bullying, and also in terms of their innate addictive qualities.

All the same, video games, played in moderation, can certainly help to lighten the mood.

Catch up on reading some good books

According to various surveys, only a small percentage of people in overall society actually read books on anything even approaching a regular basis.

This is unfortunate for various reasons – not least of all the fact that there’s good research to indicate that reading books helps to strengthen people’s minds in a variety of positive ways, including enhancing their ability to focus and engage with ideas in a deep and considered manner.

While you’ve got some time on your hands, why not catch up on reading some good books? Those could be works of literature that really move you, or a series of non-fiction books that will serve to enlighten you on a given topic, or a combination of the two.

In any case, you can be sure that reading more books will help you to explore topics and stories in a deeper way.

Go on “virtual vacation” with your family by watching gripping documentaries

Many people have recently found that their vacation plans for the year have been dramatically interrupted due to the pandemic, and this will have understandably caused unhappiness and frustration to many parents and kids alike.

Instead of just dwelling on the family getaway that had to be cancelled or postponed, however, and instead of each member of the family simply sitting in isolation with their smartphone or tablet for the duration of the quarantine period, why not go on “virtual vacation” with your family, by making a point of watching gripping documentaries together everyday?

You could treat this as an opportunity to educate your kids (and yourself,) on particular topics, and you could even do things in a structured and theme-focused way.

For example, one week could be “Egypt week,” where you and the rest of the family watch documentaries about ancient Egypt each day, along with some entertaining fictionalized films based on that subject.

Then, you could focus on “the oceans,” and watch documentaries such as the Blue Planet series.

All in all, approaching things this way could potentially have a very positive overall effect for everyone involved, while also having the added benefit of providing a sense of structure and direction, in an otherwise tricky and chaotic situation.