“In these troubled times, out of an abundance of caution” (or ITTTooaAoC) starts off just about every email I receive announcing the cancellation of an event, or the closing of another office location due to COVID-19.

Companies in the tech sectors that we follow must suddenly change their work habits. If they didn’t have a remote work culture, they are getting a crash course in it now.

WFH is not a stretch for an analyst like myself. Beyond our tradeshow visits, we always conducted most of our briefings and talks from our home offices. 

Now, like me, the vendors are also at home. It’s fun to hear and see kids and dogs and cats stealing the scene in the background, rather than the glass walls of Conference Room B.

What changed for me? I still have a job to do now, when so many others have been laid off, or lost the small business they spent a lifetime building, simply because they picked the wrong industry.

I had a panic myself — three weeks ago. I was powering through my day, had a couple pots of coffee, determined to not let anything distract me, but around 2pm I got a DM from someone, and started looking at the news. Grim statistics, people I know testing positive, the states had finally instituted stay at home orders, millions filing for unemployment with no response, stock market crashing, public gatherings still exposing more to this malaise… and what about my own folks?

Why was my head pounding? A lot of people I know have lost their jobs. Others must work on the front lines — in hospitals, as first responders, and in grocery stores and warehouses, at great risk. They are essential. Why, then, should I deserve to be stressed? I’m non-essential.

You’re not non-essential.

Chances are if you even have the time to read this, you might consider yourself too lucky. You are probably working from home, in some form of IT or digital business.

Maybe like me, you might also feel a sense of digital survivor’s guilt. You are still paid to do a job that basically consists of moving bits around from System A to System B, and back. You’re not putting yourself in harm’s way.

I have talked to peers and friends who are working more hours now than ever before, 12 or 16-hour days, even though there is no commute and no inter-office banter to eat up productive time.

Maybe their employers are short-staffed or have frozen budgets now, and more manual work to do. Maybe they are making up for lost deals, scrambling to keep things running, and preserve whatever revenue is left. 

Some IT pros are also experiencing unprecedented demands right now — if they are working at an online training vendor or collaboration service with usage skyrocketing. Or they are getting a loan application to scale, which small businesses are depending upon for emergency funds.

You may be lucky enough to have a productive technology job that somebody deems worth paying for you to do from home right now. And maybe the work doesn’t proceed as smoothly as it used to. That’s no reason to be so hard on yourself.

Whatever part you can do, even if it is only the act of working safely from home while keeping the lights that support our economy blinking, that’s not non-essential.

Convert that energy into innovation

There is no value in digital survivor’s guilt. It makes you lose focus, even if you work twice as many hours to make up for it. Unproductive work at best, and mistake-filled results at worst.

If you could convert that digital survivor’s guilt into digital gratitude — you might realize that no matter what happens there will still be a massive need for innovation to find your company’s way out, and find our way out of this situation collectively. 

Even if you aren’t fully employed right now and your position has been impacted by the pandemic, this would be a good time to learn something new. There will likely still be a shortage of skilled tech workers when we come out of this crisis, because before the crisis many companies were reporting a 40% or more hiring shortage.

There are so many cool things that need to be done right now. You could be:

• Rebuilding the pharmaceutical supply chain for your region or country.
• Updating and adapting a previous workhorse generation of financial systems to support the volume of events demanded by customers and businesses.
• Securing vulnerable individuals and devices against increasingly opportunistic cyberattacks.
• Offering software and compute power for predictive global calculations, and genetic and chemical research projects to help accelerate cures and treatments.
• 3D design and fabrication of parts to adapt other products to needed medical devices like ventilators.
• Bringing connectivity to rural and heavily impacted areas that need communication and data more than ever.
• Contributing to an open source project to improve the resiliency of our infrastructure.
• Remotely teaching others valuable skills.

The Intellyx Take

We may learn to better appreciate a new class of innovation after this, the kind that can’t be valued simply by its profitability. 

There will be plenty of code-ready projects to apply our efforts to. We’ll all be thankful for the ones that gave back to society.

But don’t let digital survivor’s guilt sink in. Have gratitude for those who are doing essential work so you can do your work. Even doing your own current job from home, the best you can, ITTT, is contributing something of value in terms of our ability to recover. 

Keeping the ‘digital backbone’ of the world’s economy upright, as my colleague Jason Bloomberg would say, isn’t easy, and it’s still necessary.

© 2020, Intellyx, LLC. Intellyx publishes the weekly Cortex and Brain Candy newsletters, and advises business leaders and technology vendors on their digital transformation strategies. Intellyx retains editorial control over the content of this document. At the time of writing, no parties mentioned in this story are Intellyx customers. Image source: Susanne Nilsson, flickr.