The Coronavirus Economy: The cookbook author writing a book on working alone

‘I would say my brain has melted, on a couple of occasions.’

Following up seven cookbooks—many covering the cuisines of Portugal, Greece, and Turkey—writer and TV presenter Rebecca Seal is preparing to publish her next cookbook, Happy Fast Food, for the British restaurant chain Leon on May 28. And this spring, while under lockdown in London, she completed her first non-food book. Solo: How to Work Alone Without Losing Your Mind centers on functioning as a freelancer, and it will be released early next year.

It’s no understatement to say that it’s a timely topic. While millions of workers might be experiencing working at home for the first time, Seal says global lockdowns have not dramatically changed her view on what it takes to function—and be happy—while working on your own. One key piece of advice: Take a break. 

Fortune spoke with Seal for a new series, The Coronavirus Economy, on writing about working alone while under lockdown, and how her income and family life have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Fortune: Tell me about the origin of the book you’re just finishing up now.

Seal: I’ve been “solo” freelance for almost 12 years now. And I kind of really hit a wall about seven years ago, where I was kind of outwardly, technically, successful, and I knew people viewed it as I was living a really great life. But I was miserable. Really miserable.

I was working at least six days a week, I was working very, very long hours, and I was never shutting off from work. It was very rare for me to see my friends. My husband and I—we weren’t married then—but we were really just not taking holidays, and any of the trips we were doing were for work purposes. Also, we were also going through infertility diagnoses and IVF, which was fun. And I was just so confused as to why I was having all the things I wanted, and making more money than I’ve ever made, before or since, and just—completely blown apart by the experience.

And so I went looking for a book, which is what I always do. I always go looking for words, to help me figure out my perspective on a problem. And there wasn’t one. There were lots of things on how to do your taxes if you’re self-employed, there were sort of freelancing handbooks. But I didn’t feel as if there was anything about how to cope with being on your own all the time, and having to set your own visions of success, and your own rhythms and routines and parameters. And everything being on you. And very often being on your own in a context where there was no capacity or appeared to be no capacity to expand your team. I’m a freelance writer; I’ve come to understand that I have a team of my own—but that’s about a perspective shift. I’m never going to be in a position to have five people working for me. So there wasn’t particularly [a feeling] at the time as if there was any way to make myself less alone. And that felt very…sticky.  So I thought, “Wow, there’s no book. I should write the book.” Because if I feel this way, other people feel this way.

And I started talking to all sorts of other freelance workers in all sorts of fields and understood very quickly that they felt the same way, or versions of the same way. There was a big portfolio of issues that solo workers face that not many of us knew how to deal with, or how to access support for, if indeed support existed. So, that was the beginning. 

Can you give me some sense of what lessons you’ve taken away from writing this book?

Oh, my God, so many. My main message in the book, as a whole, is figuring out how to move work out of the dead center of your life, which is very hard—particularly because we’re often told to think about work in terms of “passion.”

I want to help people work more effectively in the hours that they do work, so there’s a bit of stuff about focus, productivity, creativity. What I’ve come to understand is, in order to do that, you have to be kind to yourself. You have to give yourself regular breaks during your day. You have to have time off. You have to not consistently work really long hours. Obviously, it will happen now and then. But you have to have a sense of the start and the end to your day, so you don’t start your day looking at emails and end your day looking at them. Because that means you’re effectively “on” as a freelancer for up to 65 hours a week, research has shown.

I want to help people work better, so they don’t have to work as long. And by not working as long, you free up more of your life for life that’s not work, and you allow your brain—this is scientifically based—to recharge and recover, and thus work well the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and avoid burnout—and have a long career. And enjoy it, while you’re doing it. 

This constant overworking—do you feel that it is coming from financial insecurity, or a product of the culture, or is it the personalities that sometimes thrive [in freelance]? 

I think it’s very much about all of those things. One of the chapters is about the problem of money, and the way that money again muddles our thinking. And often we think that by working really long hours [as freelancers], we will earn more. When actually, the data shows that you can send your productivity into reverse, by working a longer week. Some data showed that a 70-hour week [produced no higher productivity] than a 50-hour week [according to Stanford economist John Pencavel.] You can actually make it negative, because you damage the work that’s gone before, as well as not doing good work on the last day. And the data also shows that this damage can last for up to two weeks after a long week.

So there’s the misunderstanding. We feel financially insecure so we think we have to work really long hours to make ourselves as financially secure as possible, because we apply a kind of unitary monetary value to each hour of work that we do. But actually, that’s false logic. It doesn’t work like that. You don’t earn per hour, and after a certain hour, you can mess up so badly, or make a terrible mistake—you can send your productivity into reverse. That’s even without thinking about the harm long hours do in terms of your career as a long-term whole. 

Then there’s business as a status symbol. There’s loads of data that shows we use “busyness” to show how successful and important we are. We’ve got to a point where we actually view extreme work as a status symbol, which is beyond messed up, right? That is not a good way for a society to operate, nor is it a good way for any individual human to live. 

How has the process of writing a book about working alone while working alone—in a pandemic—been personally?

I would say my brain has melted, on a couple of occasions. It has been simultaneously advantageous and really hard.

On the one hand, I had this period of time where my husband had no work, so he could do the lion’s share of the childcare, and I could be on my own, writing, in these intense bursts of time. And my emails weren’t going—nobody else wanted me to do anything! I’m a journalist, I’m a cookbook writer, and I’ve got this other book on the go. Back in December, I was really struggling to keep all the balls in the air. But then the pandemic happened, and all the balls disappeared. Financially, not so fun, but useful—from a book-finishing point of view. 

It was harder because it was just harder to focus. We were all really ill at the beginning; we think we’ve had it, and one of my daughters was really ill, and that was frightening. Obviously during that period, I didn’t work at all. My parents nearly got trapped in Australia, my sister is in Australia with a newborn baby. I’ve got elderly relatives who are on their own, the same as everybody.

The capacity to think big thoughts—and make sense of them at the moment, or in the past few weeks—has been really, really, hard. So the opportunity was better, but the process was harder.

Like you said, you’re a journalist, you’re a cookbook writer, you have a photography studio. What’s the impact been on all the other parts of your business?

The photography studio is closed. We’re following government guidelines to tentatively reopen for very small photo shoots. I’ve bought so much sanitizer, I can’t even tell you. The impact there has been really big—no income from that part at all.

And my husband is a food photographer, and he primarily [shoots for] cookbooks, brands, and for chefs. And that is not happening at the moment. Slowly, slowly, things are starting to pick up. And he has some interesting challenges, where people said, “Is there anything you can do on your own? Can you do any solo shoots?” So he’s learned to make stop-motion films for this.  

We’ve also done some shoots together. We’ve done some funny things where I’ve cooked the food, and run back to look after the kids, and he has run up the road [to the studio] to photograph the food, and I’ve run back again to make the next dish. 

So we’ve come up with some creative solutions. Because people are quite happy to work with couples. Although we decided to stop working on shoots together six or seven years ago because we decided that we probably wouldn’t survive as a couple if we did. So there’s always this, “Should we do this?” But at the moment it’s like, “Yeah, okay, sure, we’ll do it!”

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