How to Work Alone: Resilience, Boundaries and Nature
Rebecca Seal is a writer and author. She writes about food and drinks, about personal development and work. She recently published “Solo: How to Work Alone (and Not Lose Your Mind)” and now does workshops and talks about how to survive working by yourself. She also has a Solo podcast, where she discusses how to work from home well.
Freelancing and the need to learn to say “no”
Rebecca worked for the Observer for 6 years, hired right after her internship. When she was offered voluntary redundancy, she decided to take it, along with a lot of her colleagues.
“I didn’t have children, I didn’t have a mortgage, I didn’t have too many responsibilities, so it was quite a good moment to be offered a bit of money, to start myself off as a freelancer. Scary, very very scary. But less scary than it might have been” she ponders.
And the freelancing took off really well. Almost too well. Already quite established in a small field, Rebecca knew a lot of people and had a good contacts’ book. She ended up working almost straight away for the Soho House group, as a freelance editor. For the next six years, she had a LOT of work coming her way.
“I’m very happy that I got that. But I had too much work, and I had no idea how to say no. So after 6 years of freelancing, I got really burned out. And I realized that I was very lonely and that I neglected a lot of the good things in life, and a lot of relationships” she reflects.
“It was quite difficult because I didn’t have any skills to navigate working by myself, at all, apart from being able to work”.
Writing a book about working alone as therapy
That’s when Rebecca started to read about working alone. A lot. That’s when “Solo: How to Work Alone (and Not Lose Your Mind)” happened.
“It’s perverse to deal with burnout by deciding to write a book” she starts, laughing. “But I was collecting all this information, reading all these articles from other people, and academic articles and studies …”.
Somehow, she realized that all the answers were out there, just not in the same place. She felt that, if she was going through these problems, other people would be too. She started asking questions. To other freelancers, in all sorts of fields, not just journalism and writing.
“I realized that we were all essentially going through very similar things. And that made me feel as though it was only right that I started trying to kind of synthesize all the information I was getting. I figured: this is my skill. That’s my job, I find out stuff, and then I try to make it understandable for a broader audience. That’s my one thing. So if I could do that, and put it all in a book, that would be useful”.
And then the pandemic happened, and it turned out to be more broadly applicable than she thought it would be.
“It was therapeutic. I mean, I have to be honest, it’s still more of a do as I say, not as I do situation. I mean, doing the research and the interviews have changed a huge amount of how I work, it changed my perspective completely. But there are aspects about the advice that I gave that I still find very hard to act on” she confesses.
Rebecca gets a lot of emails from people saying how much the book, or the podcast, helped them, or just sometimes to say they feel really seen, that she’d managed to capture their experience, and that is huge for her. “Feeling like you’re not strange and alone is a very powerful experience”. Writing the book felt “useful, like it’s got a purpose, and that’s a very nice feeling”.
The boundaries you need to set
When talking about the number one difficulty faced by freelancers, Rebecca is adamant: boundaries. The struggle to put your work first when you’re working, and your life first when you’re not working.
It can affect so many different areas of your life. It can be that you don’t have the physical space to set boundaries, because you’re unexpectedly working at home and your children or partner are there too.
Or it could be about the hours per week you’re supposed to be working, according to your contract, or according to yourself. “Freelancers do that to themselves all the time. We exploit ourselves”.
It could be you don’t bound the time period in which you work, or that you don’t give yourself adequate break time, and that you don’t feed yourself properly. It could be that classic work ethic problem where you constantly feel as though you should be working and if you are not you feel guilty and when you are you’re so exhausted because you’re always working.
“The vicious part of it is, the more you don’t have boundaries, the more the work spreads, the closer you’re going to get to a burnout situation. Because working harder and harder does not equal greater and greater productivity in the end. That’s the western work theory that we’ve all taken on but misunderstood completely because it’s exactly the opposite” Rebecca explains.
The resilience you need to cultivate
That’s why, to Rebecca, BRAVE is the quality that all freelancers share. “Whether you think of yourself that way or not, if you work alone you are brave”.
“I think it’s useful to think about ways in which you’re brave and ways in which you’re resilient. Because it’s a really good way to assess resilience. You can then remember moments where you have been brave and resilient. You must be if you work in this way. Because it taps into our reserves”.
Obviously, there’s a lot of other qualities one might do well to cultivate too. Like learning to be better at being alone. To enjoy the solitude. That’s something that can be practiced, by going for a walk alone or taking oneself to meals alone.
Surround yourself with nature
On top of those mental strengths that freelancers (and other people working from home) need to cultivate, Rebecca also talks about physical space.
“There’s a huge amount of research about bio feeling design and about how positively it can impact our well being. It’s the idea of bringing a natural environment into your workspace”.
“We thought that when we design an office space we should make it really as un-distracting as possible. Strip it right back, nothing natural, no softness. But that’s totally wrong. We actually need soothing and softness and nature”
For Rebecca, rearranging her space has had a profound impact on her work. First, she added plants into her working space. Her desk and her chair are made of wood. She tries to surround herself with all kinds of tactful things. Adds natural textures as much as she can. She makes sure she’s exposed to bright daylight, and that the light changes slowly to a softer light when it’s getting dark outside. She has pictures of places she loves around her.
“Doing all of those things is a very powerful way to soothe our brain. We thought that when we design an office space we should make it really as un-distracting as possible. Strip it right back, chrome black white grey, nothing natural, no softness. We thought that was a great way to get productivity out of people. But that’s totally wrong. We actually need soothing and softness and nature”.
And if you are in a situation where you don’t have a dedicated workspace, then Rebecca advises to physically put your work away at the end of the day. Hide it. Put it in a box. “Just do whatever you need to do to symbolically close it off at the end and bring it out at the beginning. It replicates what the commute would have once done for us. And it has quite a powerful effect”.
The discussion the pandemic opened: hybrid working
The pandemic really brought the freelancer and work-at-home topics to the front stage. Rebecca feels optimistic about the huge conservation that’s taking place.
“I think that it is a really fantastic opportunity for us to shift our thinking about work. To reject some models of work which frankly are best suited for the industrial revolution, and are not good for huge and varied groups in society”.
Rebecca suspects that the majority of people in employment will end up working in a hybrid sort of way, in 5 years' time or so. “And I think this is a good thing as long as it is carefully managed. There’s good evidence to show that you only need 2 days in the company with your teammates to get all of the social benefits that the 5 days week produces. 3 days at home and 2 days at the office, or vice versa, is a really neat way of working, and I think would do a lot for a lot of people, for their mental wellbeing. Both to the people who don’t like being at home, and the people who actually prefer being at home”.
For Rebecca, we are slowly beginning to understand that productivity is not the most important measure in a workforce. That it is just as crucial as, and that it can be crushed by, productivity practices.
“We are beginning to understand that you don’t have to work a 9 to 5 to be a valuable member of the workforce. You don’t actually have to work 60 hours a week. Doing really long hours is performative, not actually productive. I think that we may be able to reframe the way work operates to be more inclusive, to help people who have diverse lifestyles and diverse backgrounds, and make it a much fairer situation. That’s my hope anyway”.
Bright future ahead: books, podcast and more
Hopes and plans, Rebecca’s got a few. Her next cookbook, in partnership with the Leon restaurant group, “Happy Guts” (designed to help people have better gut health) just came out.
She thinks about a follow-up to SOLO, not yet written. And most of all, Rebecca is incredibly excited about the second season of her podcast, “The Solo Collective”.
She feels there’s still plenty to talk about. And most of all, she loves to be able to work with the production company on the project. “It’s a group of us, we make it together. We’ve never met in real life because it’s a pandemic project, but I have regular contact with colleagues. And I haven’t had that for years, 5 or 6 years, that’s been a really nice part of it. It’s so collaborative, it’s not like working for a client. I think that’s what you have to do when you’re a freelancer. You have to make yourself fake colleagues, or real ones, you have to find them”.
That and the new space she rents to work, right next to her home, has been a breath of fresh air for Rebecca. Especially welcomed this last year. “I think this will be the future for lots of people who work from home, they’ll be a lot more in the way of small coworking spaces, little hubs for people to work from”.
Hopeful regarding our future ways of working, proud of the changes she’s already made to her mental and physical freelance conditions, and happy about the projects she’s got going, Rebecca is ready for it all.
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