Working at home and working alone has always been a challenge at the best of times. When you add in a global pandemic that forces millions of people to become solo home workers with no guidance or planning, it’s no wonder things are tough for many people.
So what are the secrets to successful solo working, and what is the future of work and the workplace going to look like?
My guest this week is broadcaster and journalist Rebecca Seal. Earlier in the year, Rebecca published one of the most useful and timely books I’ve ever read. It’s called ” Solo: How to Work Alone (and not lose your mind)” and I’m delighted to able to talk to her about it.
So whether you are just trying to get through to the end of the pandemic, trying to work out whether home working is what you want to do in the long term or considering starting up in business on your own, then I guarantee you’ll get a lot of value from Rebecca’s insights.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ The challenges of working alone
▪ Why the last 12 months are not representative of working from home
▪ The opportunity to take a human-centred approach to business operations
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▪ Why do we still work in a way designed for the industrial age of the 19th Century?
▪ The importance of measuring broader outputs than time worked.
▪ Practical advice for people who are struggling and what can leaders do to help
▪ The scientific basis of Zoom fatigue
▪ Virtual worlds
▪ Why it’s too early to make decisions on the future of work.
▪
Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Eightfold AI. Eightfold AI delivers the talent intelligence platform, the most effective way for companies to retain top performers, upskill and reskill the workforce, recruit top talent efficiently, and reach diversity goals. Eightfold AI’s deep learning artificial intelligence platform empowers enterprises to turn talent management into into a competitive advantage.
Matt Alder [00:00:47]:
Hi, everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 345 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Working at home and working alone has always been a challenge at the best of times. When you add in a global pandemic that forces millions of people to become solo home workers with no guidance and no planning, it’s no wonder that things are tough for many people. So what are the secrets to successful solo working? And what is the future of work and the workplace going to look like? My guest this week is broadcaster and journalist Rebecca Seale. Earlier in the year, Rebecca published one of the most useful and timely books I have ever read. It’s called how to Work Alone and Not Lose youe Mind, and I’m delighted to be able to talk to her about it. So whether you’re just trying to get through to the end of the pandemic, trying to work out whether homeworking is what you want to do in the long term, or even considering starting up a business on your own, then I guarantee you’ll get a lot of value from Rebecca’s insights. Hi, Rebecca, and welcome to the podcast.
Rebecca Seal [00:01:57]:
Thank you very much for having me.
Matt Alder [00:01:58]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell.
Matt Alder [00:02:03]:
Us what you do?
Rebecca Seal [00:02:04]:
Sure. My name is Rebecca Seale. I am a writer and author, and most recently I published a book called Solo how to Work Alone and Not Lose youe Mind. And I’ve just started a podcast to go with it called the Solo Collective.
Matt Alder [00:02:19]:
Fantastic. So tell us a little bit about the story behind the book. Why did you write it and what’s it about?
Rebecca Seal [00:02:26]:
So I wrote it because I needed it about six years ago, maybe seven years ago now. I had a very difficult time during my work life where I was just really, really miserable, really, really lonely. So I’d been freelanced by that point for six years, and I had let work kind of overtake my entire life. I didn’t really have anything else going on. I was working six days, sometimes seven days a week. I was doing a weekly TV show, which meant that I was always, always at work. Basically Because I never. I couldn’t go on holiday. It was on 48 weeks a year. And I love doing it. This is not by any stretch complaint, but it just meant that because it was at the weekends, I was working weekends and then I was working the rest of my normal job in the week as a writer. And it just kind of snowballed until I looked up one day and realized that I didn’t. I didn’t really have much apart from work, that I was neglecting my friends and my family and myself and everything. And so I went looking for a book thinking that somebody would have written about what it is like to work by yourself and how to cope with it. Not how to do your tax return or how to format a spreadsheet or any of that stuff, but literally how to cope with the solitude and the sort of lack of structure and the lack of formal boundaries and all that stuff. And I couldn’t find one. And I know that this is a weird response to. To a situation of overwork, but somehow that kind of changed in my brain to the idea that, well, if I couldn’t find the book, then I was probably going to have to write it. And so I did. It took a few years because I had kids in the interim period. So I actually wrote the book mostly in 2019 and I finished it in lockdown. So although it’s kind of horribly relevant at the moment, it was never intended or expected to be a book that was related to the pandemic in any way. It was pure weird. People keep saying it’s fortuitous coincidence, but I’d rather no pandemic and no book sales, frankly. But yes, that’s how it all came about.
Matt Alder [00:04:30]:
It is an absolutely brilliant book. I read it a couple of weeks ago and I found myself wishing that a book like it existed 10 years ago when I was going out on my own and I was nodding along at lots of lessons learned the hard way. You mentioned the pandemic there, and obviously that has changed work for pretty everyone. And a lot of people find themselves in. In a position or a similar position to. To what you talk about in the book. I mean, what. What are you seeing? How is the. The pandemic redefining work and making more people into sort of work soloists.
Rebecca Seal [00:05:03]:
Yeah. So obviously, because people have shifted to homeworking in such big numbers, there are now a lot more people kind of grappling with these same issues that I was struggling with a few years ago. And I would say in a kind of more intense way, because obviously a Lot of the things that we would normally do to help us cope with working by ourselves are effectively illegal now in that right now at this exact moment when we’re recording, you know, we can’t meet up in groups and we can’t go to the pub and things like that. So I think that’s made people’s experience of working remotely a lot more extreme in this past year. And I think it’s really important to note that what we’re experiencing now in terms of particularly working from home, is not normal working from home. So if you’re working for an organisation which is thinking about being remote in the very long term and that frightens the pants off you, then try not to feel too much that way. Because this last year is not representative of what remote work is like. I mean, I don’t know about you, I know you’ve been doing it for a long time. I’ve been doing it for 12 years now. And there have been moments where it has been a real struggle for me in the past year. Even though I know all the tricks, I wrote the book on the tricks and the ways to make it feel better. But this year has been a spectacular challenge for all of us. So, yeah, I think it’s important to note that you might well like working from home, even if you think that your first experience of it in this last year has driven you to want the office more than more than anything else in the world. So I think that’s one part of it. I think obviously it’s going to lead to radical shifts in the way that organizations and individuals choose to work over the next few years. And I’m actually really hopeful. I think that we’re at a moment where we could see some really, really positive changes. I think we might see at least some organizations. I don’t think we can say it is going to be true for the whole of working culture, but I think we will at least see some organizations who realize that they can have a more human centered approach to their operations, one that allows people to have a life rather than just bending their life around their jobs. So I think we will see more of that and I hope that that will become a widespread trend which really positively impacts people’s lives sort of globally. Because for, you know, 200 odd years or since the end of the Industrial Revolution, we’ve been working in patterns which are reflective of what 19th century industrialists wanted their factory workers to follow that were really only generated by the introduction of electric lighting. You know, we are following, we’re following Modes of working, nine to fives and eight hour working days and you know, or longer that were never designed to suit the human brain or the human body or human lives. And this is a moment for us like those things have been torn up. And although this past year has been incredibly hard and has involved huge numbers of challenges, for every individual who’s experienced change, the outcome could be something quite brilliant and spectacular. You know, a shift away from ways of working which for many, many, many people were never suitable in the first place.
Matt Alder [00:08:28]:
Absolutely. I want to sort of dive into that in a second in terms of what the future of work might look like. But to your earlier point, I completely agree. I kind of built my, my solo working life around a beautiful combination of homeworking and co working spaces and lots of travel to conferences and lots of networking and meeting people and spending a year locked in with a five year old wasn’t, wasn’t ever on, wasn’t ever on the roadmap there. Before we sort of talk more about the. I think it’d be great to talk about some of the practical advice that could help people sort of right now as they’re even a year on struggling with some of the aspects of working from home. So in your book you talk very practically, you talk strategically, you talk about wellness. What is the sort of, the most important advice to pick out of all of that that you could give to people who are really sort of struggling with this sort of home solo working right now?
Rebecca Seal [00:09:24]:
Big, big question. I mean there’s lots of, there’s lots of sort of individual bits of advice which I think suit different people in different ways. But I guess one of the, one of the things that I quite often think is useful is to think about the literal setup where you’re working. And obviously we don’t have a lot of choice, many of us, in terms of where we work when we’ve been kind of thrown into homeworking unexpectedly and we’re talking from the UK and the houses in the UK are not known for their expansiveness. So most people won’t have a dedicated extra room in which to work. So one of the things that I think is a really powerful trick to play on our brains in terms of helping us to establish the beginning and end of our working days, which are two of the things which people struggle with the most, I think is to have a specific space in which you work and if it’s not a dedicated space in which you work, then to tidy everything away at the end of the day, like chuck it all in a box, put it on a shelf in a cupboard, close the door, if it has to be left out, throw a sheet over it or a throw. Or do something symbolic which kind of replicates the job that the commute would once have done. That helps your brain kind of decouple from the work mode and get back into home mode. Because that’s one of the real trickinesses of working from home or working remotely is that we don’t. We don’t have the kind of transitional. They’re called transitional rituals. These things that allow us to kind of shift from one state of being to another. And when it’s all happening in the same space, that’s even harder. So if you can kind of recreate things, they don’t, you know, you don’t have to go and walk around the block. Some people do do that. But if you can kind of mindfully create rituals which help you to know that the transition is happening, then that can kind of habituate you into starting work at particular times as well. So, for example, for me, quite a vain thing. But I always wear, like, makeup as though I was going into an office. And I’m always dressed for work. And I also have this kind of set of little activities that I do. So my second cup of coffee is a sort of marker that works. About to start. If a particular radio show comes on, then I’m late, you know, I shouldn’t hear the beginning of this particular radio show. That’s a marker that I’m kind of not starting at the time of day that I’d like to. So you don’t necessarily have to create new things. You don’t have to do anything dramatic. It’s about making notes of the ways in which you already have kind of vague transitional rituals and keeping them clear in your mind and then having ones for the end of the day as well. So some people kind of burn a candle during their working day and they blow that out. I know that that’s really powerful for a lot of people. Other people will take a shower or change their clothes or whatever. And it’s startling how kind of powerful those small activities can be. So a lot of this stuff is not massive. It doesn’t. You know, some of it is big and grand. Some of the ideas in the book are kind of big, grand challenges. But many of many of them are really small things that you can do like that. The other thing that I think is really critical school is to take breaks. A lot of the advice I give isn’t actually about how to work it’s about how to look after yourself so that you can work. And so taking breaks during your working day is really, really important. And I’m a particular advocate of a good lunch break, which is partly because my sideline, or not sideline mainline probably is writing about food and writing cookery books. So I am very sort of committed to good food. But there’s also loads of really good evidence to show that taking a break that involves doing something completely detached from your work, that allows your brain to kind of engage with something totally different is really good for recovery from work, but it also gives your brain an opportunity to kind of come up with subconscious, creative solutions to problems which all of us in our working lives will need at some point or other. So it’s. It feels counterproductive. Sometimes we feel as though we’re in a tunnel and we can’t stop working because we’ve got so much to do. Oh, my God. Oh, my God, we’ve got so much to do. But actually, often pausing and giving yourself a moment to kind of refresh and recharge is how you will get that work done more efficiently later on in the day. It’s a kind of. It feels paradoxical, but it’s. It’s extraordinarily effective. So. So those are probably my two top tips.
Matt Alder [00:13:53]:
And obviously, a lot of people listening have found themselves in the position where they’re having to manage remote teams while working remotely themselves. And there’s been a lot of sort of focus on zoom fatigue. You know, we’re recording this about a week after Citibank announced they were having Zoom Free Fridays so people could get some mental space and get some work done. What would your advice be to employers, or what have you seen that employers are doing that’s really helping people through what’s still a very, very difficult time?
Rebecca Seal [00:14:32]:
Yeah. So zoom fatigue is fascinating. It’s really real. We know that now because of a big study that came out of Stanford University about three weeks back from now. It is due to the fact that we find it really difficult to maintain eye contact through zoom, particularly with multiple faces at once. It’s quite an exhausting experience. We miss out on all of the body language cues that you would otherwise get when you’re looking at somebody in real life. And it’s a kind of technological overload for our brains. The amount of data that we get through the screen is just kind of just too much for us. So, I mean, one of the things that is really useful, and I know a lot of organizations are already embracing this, is Simply to try and minimize the number of Zooms or equivalent technologies by having voice calls wherever possible. I know some organizations are using things like Clubhouse, for example, to have audio only meetings. And obviously you can do that with Zoom and teams and things like that too. You can ask the question of, do we actually need to see fuzzy, slightly delayed versions of ourselves in this particular meeting? Um, is that, is that necessary? I mean, you and I haven’t got video on this and that’s, that’s quite refreshing frankly. And certainly when it’s a one on one thing, you don’t need to. And if you’re, if you’re doing a one on one then, and you’re not using video, then that gives the person great, much greater mobility. Will give both of you greater mobility because obviously you’re not tied to a screen. You can put your device in your pocket and go for a walk or get on your bike or whatever. And that again, that’s one of the massive problems with. Assume that we’re seeing people just sitting for much greater lengths of time than we would even when we were in the office. Because we would have been, even if we were having meetings, we would have been moving between them. So anything that can kind of get people moving is really, really useful. And there are a bunch of apps coming through and there are some in existence already which are really useful in terms of just being for audio meetings. The other thing that I’ve just been writing about, actually the article’s not come out yet, is about alternatives to Zoom. And so I’ve been using a few kind of gamified ways of having meetings. So one of the things that I really enjoyed using, which is quite light hearted, is called Mozilla Hubs. And it is a virtual world where you go and take on an avatar. You can kind of design your own or choose your own. And it’s all very playful. They’re not human like at all, they’re kind of cartoons. The last time I was there I was, I had someone in my meeting who was a bat who just like her wings just flapped rhythmically up and down throughout the meeting. And it’s a virtual space that’s designed in quite a kind of cartoon like way. But the functionalities within it mean that you can show, you can display like 3D models, you can have charts on the wall, you can have exhibits, exhibitions, you can, you know, bring up spreadsheets, you can brainstorm together in, you know, using a document that’s kind of floating in the air between all the avatars and it sounds kind of mad and I’m not a gamer, so this is a completely alien world to me. But I actually really enjoy them. They’re very, it’s very fun, which I think we all need more of. And obviously there are some meetings where you wouldn’t want to have a bat. It wouldn’t be appropriate to have a bat in the, in the corner of the room. But it, for, for, you know, for creative endeavors or kind of all hands meetings or whatever it was. It is really nice. It’s just really fun. And there’s, there’s no requirement to have video within it, so you’re not looking at other people’s faces, so your brain isn’t trying to kind of decode all that 2D, 3D stuff. There’s no, there’s no kind of body language to kind of try and get your head around and you’re not distracted by people’s strange backgrounds or, you know, odd things you can see in the corner of their screens. So it’s. I really like it. And there are lots of different ones. There’s one called Gather Town which is also really interesting. So I think there are. People are really trying, developers are really trying to create ways that we can kind of work better remotely without the kind of seem to stuff. The other thing that I would add as well is that in the research for that piece, what a lot of workers were reporting to me is online surveillance. And I just would like to emphasize, and I’m going to say this in every conversation I have over the next kind of two years probably about work, just don’t, don’t do is such a counterproductive way to manage people. There’s so much evidence to show that surveillance of workers increases employee turnover, reduces their well being, reduces productivity, reduces feelings of trust. And yet I’m hearing from multiple different organizations, from staff in different organizations that they’re being really, really tightly monitored. Like the keystrokes that they’re doing, the number of hours that they are on a call, and in some cases it’s compared within teams. Somebody was telling me about a meeting where once a week where their numbers would be within the team would be compared by their manager in terms of who’d been at their desk the most. And it’s just that I just find that mind blowing, baffling because it’s the, it’s so well proved that it’s a terrible way of managing people and particularly managing their mental health. So if, if you’ve got the capacity to monitor your staff, don’t do it. And if you don’t have the capacity, don’t pursue it because it’s just, it’s just so horrible and it doesn’t do anybody any good.
Matt Alder [00:20:12]:
And I suppose that that’s going back to the, the kind of, the trust issues that, that come from the fact that many companies haven’t actually left the, the Victorian era when it comes to sort of time and motion and presenteeism and the amount of time you spend typing equals the sort of, you know, the value they give to the, the company. And there are lots of companies still like that, aren’t there?
Rebecca Seal [00:20:35]:
Yeah, there are, there really are. I’ve had, you know, robust discussions, let’s say, with a, with a few people on that front recently. And it’s just, yeah, if you’re not making rivets, it doesn’t matter how long you’re spending doing it. You know, if you don’t have a kind of tangible outcome because you’re working in the creative industries or you know, a knowledge economy more broadly, then the time that you spend sitting at your desk isn’t really, it’s just not a good measure. It feels like the only measure, but it isn’t and it’s just not a good one. We’ve just got to shift our mindsets towards, you know, broader outcomes rather than hours worked because it’s just, it’s just never ever been a good way. Ever since people stopped making rivets on a factory line, it’s never been a good way of measuring productivity. And indeed, there’s a really substantial body of research that shows that after a certain number of hours per week, your productivity goes into decline. Not just decline, in fact, it goes into reverse. So I think it’s, I can’t remember the exact number. It’s 65 or 70 hours a week. I think it’s 70, which is obviously a lot. But after 70 hours a week, you start to damage the work that’s gone before. It’s not simply that you slow down, it’s that you actually start to undo the good that you’ve done. And, you know, if you’re in the medical profession, you’ll already know that it’s the moment where accidents are most likely to happen, where medical negligence cases mostly arises, when people have been working incredibly long hours. So it’s not, this is not new news. We know this. We know that long hours doesn’t equate to high productivity. But even when you take it down a notch and you’re not talking about kind of 70 hour weeks, you’re just Talking about forcing people into working patterns that don’t necessarily suit the rhythms of their brain or indeed the requirements of their life. It just doesn’t get the best out of. It just doesn’t get the best out of workers being monitored. Having someone digitally, virtually or really over your shoulder tapping you, saying, have you done it yet? Have you done it yet? Have you done it yet? Just doesn’t work.
Matt Alder [00:22:47]:
No, absolutely. And I suppose that takes us on to the future. What’s going to happen as we hopefully come out of this pandemic and work kind of finds whatever a new normal looks like. And obviously it’s a complicated discussion. There are lots of people who can’t do their job at home. So I suppose that we’re really talking about the future for knowledge workers. And again, in the last couple of weeks we’ve seen two very different positions. We’ve seen the CEO of Goldman Sachs demanding that everyone comes back to the office to work the 120 hour weeks or whatever they want them to work. But at the same time, Nationwide, which is a building society in the uk, has said that its non branch staff can work wherever they like. This is obviously going to be the debate and the discussion of the coming sort of months or years. What do you think is going to happen? What should employers be thinking about?
Rebecca Seal [00:23:41]:
I mean, I think that it’s. Firstly, I think it’s very early to make big decisions of that sort, probably on both sides of the divide, mainly because we’re all completely exhausted and I’m not sure now is a good moment for any of us to be making big decisions about anything. Like, I’m not sure I’ve got the energy to decide what to have for dinner, let alone to make a really big life decision. So I think that’s one tricky element. And I also think that a lot of people are relying on staff surveys to decide how they might operate in future. And I think that’s a bit of a tricky one because obviously if you ask somebody in January in the UK who was homeschooling and it was raining solidly and a sea of mud was visible from every window and you know, you said to them, would you like to go back to the office? They would have mostly said yes. I mean, I would have said yes at that point. So I, I just think it’s quite early in, in what people keep calling the work from home experiment. I don’t really think we’ve reached the end of that yet. And I think we need to give people the opportunity to work from home or work remotely or work flexibly when it’s not under the major restrictions of the middle of a global pandemic. Because as I said earlier, that’s a very, very, very different experience. And people may have completely different opinions on how that might work and what their life might look like if they’re allowed to go to the park or the pub or, you know, on holiday or whatever, then I think working from home becomes a slightly more attractive option. But I think. I don’t know. I had a conversation with somebody about this yesterday. He was saying that he thought that it would move by industry, by industry. But as we’re seeing with kind of the divergence between Nationwide and Goldman Sachs, the financial industry is already showing it’s going in two different directions. The tech industry seems to be moving quite strongly in the direction of working from home. But obviously their sort of way of working really suits that. I mean, I think each individual organization is going to have to take a really hard look at how they worked in the past and what’s happened over the last year. And it may be that things need to break down team by team, that it’s not even organizational because there will be some teams who need much more time together and there will be other teams that don’t at all. And again, it will be a completely different situation when people can meet up. It may be that we realise that we only need a few hours in the office or in fact, there’s a kind of perfect ratio which has come out of lots of research on work, which is, I think it’s three days at home, two days in the office and two days rest in terms of how your week shakes down. And I mean, to me that sounds quite lovely. So you get three days of kind of focused work where you, where you don’t get interrupted and you can shift your work to fit around your life. And then you’ve got two predictable days where you’ve got all the social kind of positives of office life and all the kind of office culture stuff can be done in that time too, and everything that’s collaborative and face to face, but you don’t have to commit to a fully five day week version of working and you don’t have to make that commute, you know, say you live further away from your office or whatever. So you get, you get the best of all the worlds, really. So I think quite a lot of people will probably approach it with a hybrid kind of point of view, but it’s just, it’s all so sort of nuanced and Tangled, because I’m sure you’re aware of the research before the pandemic that showed that people who worked in organisations where some people were remote and some people weren’t remote, the remote people tended not to win the career premiums that the people who were in office did because they were more visible. But maybe, again, that might have changed because we now understand more about people who work from home, because we’ve all done it, or not all of us, but so many of us have done it. And so our attitudes to people who work from home will be more positive. You know, blah, blah, blah. Like there’s so much to untangle. I kind of. I guess my main thing about this is that anyone who says they’ve got all the answers at this particular stage in the game doesn’t. It’s just too. It’s too much. It’s too much too soon.
Matt Alder [00:27:46]:
Absolutely. I think that’s why it’s going to be such an interesting few months, if not few years in terms of how this all kind of settles.
Rebecca Seal [00:27:54]:
Yeah. And I think it will take. It will take years. And I also think that there will be a certain amount of, kind of staff and workers voting with their feet, because I think there will be people who totally want to be back in the office five days a week, who’ve been horribly lonely and have hated this entire situation and just really want to get back, and they will choose to work for organisations where that’s possible. You know, in the same way that people have made choices for generations about the kind of organization they want to work for, for cultural reasons and benefits reasons, or location or whatever it may be, people will start to make choices about the way in which an officer, you know, does its work, where it does its work, and that, you know, that’s fine. So I think this will take maybe five years to kind of really show in terms of what it’s done to working culture and that, you know, there are organizations who have gone fully remote who will stay that way for sure, and there are organizations for whom remote work just seems completely alien and nobody’s right or wrong. I guess the more important thing is that each individual person chooses or has the opportunity to choose the organisation or mode of working that best suits them, and that we continue to have conversations with ourselves about what that looks like for us individually. I mean, that in a way, that’s what my. My solo book is mostly about. It’s about saying, let’s. Let’s figure out who we are in terms of the work that we do and what it is that we need, like, how our brains work, because everybody will answer those questions differently. And. And that is something that we haven’t necessarily had time to do during this pandemic because there’s been a hamster wheel kind of effect for all of us. So. So maybe now is the moment to say, okay, let’s. Let’s take a breath. Let’s not do anything too dramatic right now, but let’s sort of have a conversation with each of us, with each of ourselves individually and think, what actually have. I liked what did I. Did I not like what might work well for me in the future? And rather than just being sort of swept along in whatever our organization or mode of working does.
Matt Alder [00:29:49]:
Next, slight change of topic to my favourite topic, which is talking about podcasting. You’ve recently launched a podcast. Tell us a bit about your podcast.
Rebecca Seal [00:30:01]:
Thank you. Yeah, so it’s called the Solo Collective, and it is a series of conversations which expand on some of the topics in the book. So I felt very strongly that it was, you know, the book was really, really. I’m really glad that I wrote the book and I’m. I’m really happy with it, but that this is a massive topic and loads of different people have got lots of different ways to add wisdom to it. So I just kind of wanted to carry on talking about it. And as you can tell, I really like talking about this stuff. So I asked Emma Gannon first, who is the host of a very popular kind of loose. It’s loosely termed a careers podcast, but it’s actually quite a lot bigger than that, but called Control, Alt, Delete. So she was our first guest and then we. And we talked about self sabotage and the ways in which we can get in our. In the way of our own success or indeed in the way of our own lives, because she’s written a book about that. And then the next episode. We’ve only done three. We’ve only released three so far. But next episode was with Dr. Laurie Santos from Yale University, who has another podcast called the Happiness Lab, which is brilliant. And that was about finding ways to be happy when you work by yourself, which was just absolutely brilliant. And then this week’s episode is with Anne Helen Peterson, and it is about burnout and kind of the structural ways in which world of work contributes to that. It’s a really. I feel like it’s a really important conversation. She’s the world expert on burnout. She wrote a brilliant book called Can’t Even, which came out last year. And, yeah, that was just Fascinating. And then the future episodes involve things like Rest with Alex Soojin, Kim Pang, who’s a brilliant writer on how to rest, basically, when you work really hard. And we’re also talking about the relationships, the way that you manage your relationships when you work from home or work alone with a brilliant woman called, I keep saying brilliant, but with a fantastic author and writer and academic called Jennifer Petroglieri, who studies how career couples manage to stay together, which is just a fascinating topic. So she’s. Yeah, she’s great. So. So it’s just. It’s conversations for and about solo workers and it’s for anybody who works for themselves or by themselves. And it’s about how to cope. It’s about the kind of emotional and psychological stuff around work when you’re on your own. So, yeah, I’m so thrilled. It feels like such a privilege, particularly at this particular moment, to have the opportunity to talk about stuff that can help people construct a better way of working for themselves. Like, it feels quite extraordinary that that’s something that I get to do for a job.
Matt Alder [00:32:49]:
Final question, where can people find the podcast? Where can they find the book, and.
Matt Alder [00:32:54]:
Where can they connect with you so.
Rebecca Seal [00:32:56]:
You can find the book, as someone said to me recently, in all the good bookshops and the bad one. So solo how to work alone and not lose your mind is the title. And it’s available very broadly. It’s also available in seven different languages, I think now. And it came out in America in February and in Australia and New Zealand in January. So it’s very much global. The Solo collective can be found wherever you get your podcast, to use that overused phrase. And you can find me online on Twitter ebeccaseal or Instagram Ex seal, which is B E X Seal. And the website for the book is howtoworkalone.com and you can find all of that information there. If none of the rest of what I just said went in.
Matt Alder [00:33:40]:
Rebecca, thank you very much for talking to me.
Rebecca Seal [00:33:42]:
Thank you so much. Thanks for the opportunity to talk about this stuff. I really love it, so I’m very grateful.
Matt Alder [00:33:47]:
My thanks to Rebecca Seal. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting future. You can search through all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time, and I hope you’ll join me.
