At work, our days are pretty structured. We know what we’re supposed to be doing most of the time.

At home, though, things are looser. And our leisure time—the portion of the day that’s really, truly ours—tends to be the least structured of all.

This may seem like a good thing, but it can be a big problem. Without a plan, we tend toward passive leisure activities: activities that entertain us without requiring much physical or mental effort, like watching TV and browsing social media. A little passive leisure is fine, but many passive leisure activities are engineered to be addictive. They can grow to devour nearly all of our free time, leaving our lives a bit empty.

No one’s life is normal right now.

Some folks are sick or are caring for the sick. Most of us, though, are healthy and trying to stay that way. And while there are still plenty of things that must be done, for those of use who rely on a daily routine for productivity and sanity, it’s gotten a lot harder to do them. So, while acknowledging that there are way bigger problems in the world right now, let’s think for a moment about how we can recapture a sense of normalcy amidst chaos.

In challenging times, everything counts for more.

• Kindness and apathy.
• Going above and beyond and phoning it in.
• Generosity and selfishness.

The good stuff’s better and the bad stuff’s worse. So if there was ever a time to overcome fear, to turn our focus outward, and to make a difference for someone else, this is it.

If you’ve been waiting for a good time to do some good, why not now?

Change is hard to swallow, and the entire world has choked down a heaping spoonful of it over the last few weeks. We’re all wrestling with big questions that can’t be answered:

• What will the world look like in a week? A month?
• How bad will the economy get?
• When will normal life resume?

We can’t control any of this, so it’s not worth focusing on. Here’s what we might focus on instead:

This coronavirus thing is getting surreal, isn't it?

It's officially a pandemic now, receiving wall-to-wall media coverage and altering the fabric of society. But look around you—things still look mostly normal, right? It's hard to believe that in a matter of days or weeks, life could be very different.

We humans tend to suffer from normalcy bias, a tendency to underestimate the likelihood of a disaster and the severity of that disaster's effects. In short, our brains want to believe that the way things are is the way they'll always be. Plus, we struggle to understand threats we can't see.