How to switch off

One of the things I’m enjoying most about being a freelancer is having the freedom to work at times that suit me, whether that’s 10pm or 9am. But I’m finding that having the choice of when to work also makes it hard to stop working.

I don’t just mean struggling to turn off my computer and walk away from it. I’ve found it really difficult to turn my brain off, for want of a better phrase, and actually take a day away from work without feeling guilty, or a growing pressure that I should be doing something ‘useful’.

So, what is useful?

In fact, let’s examine the word useful in this context. Logically, I know that having a day or two for myself is useful in that it helps me recharge my batteries, keeps me sane and generally means that I don’t burn out. But when you’ve got the pressure of needing to find your own work, it can be hard to believe that spending a day at the beach is a useful thing to do.

During my first month as a freelancer, I was doing some kind of work pretty much every day, ranging from teaching SUP and working on writing projects to updating my LinkedIn profile and attending networking events.

I started to get really stressed at the prospect of not having any new work coming in (see my previous post about the fear and the freedom), and was frantically looking online to find solutions, but not really focusing on anything and therefore achieving nothing.

I talked to my best friend (of course), who told me to take a day off and stop stressing, I did just that. I watched a movie, walked the dog, pottered around my flat and did some shopping. And I felt better for not having looked at my laptop.

The next day I sat down to work and everything seemed much clearer. I was able to prioritise and focus properly on a task instead of jumping ineffectively between three. I felt so much better. A day later I was offered a new project. Now, that didn’t happen because I’d taken a day off, but it did show me that I need to learn to be more patient.

Taking a step back

I have to constantly remind myself that the reason I became a freelancer was to improve my work-life balance. I need to take a step back and look at my work in the wider context of my life and make sure it’s not taking over or negatively impacting it.

That’s not always easy to do, especially when you’re so emotionally invested in a situation, but I’ve found getting that distance is crucial. There are a few things that I’m starting to do now to help disconnect from work. One of them is yoga - I find it incredibly freeing because I focus so much on my practice that I really don’t think about anything else while I’m on my mat and somehow by the time I finish and my mind starts racing again, it seems easier to recognise the trivial things for what they are, when a few hours before they were making me worry.

My friends and family are also incredibly important when it comes to stepping away from work. Spending time with them is always a pleasure and a wonderful distraction. Sometimes we talk about work, but usually that’s far from our minds when we’re together. I’ve also got some amazing friends who help ground me and remind me what’s important - sometimes you need someone to tell you to stop being so stupid and just enjoy life to realise what a state you’re getting yourself into.

Setting tasks

The other thing that I’ve found really useful in helping me switch off is setting tasks to achieve each day that I am working. I’m a big fan of to-do lists anyway, so this suits my personality well.

But if I tell myself that I need to get X, Y and Z done today, then I find firstly that I’m more productive and secondly that once I’ve accomplished those tasks, I don’t feel guilty for walking away from my computer.

Working as a freelancer is very different to working for someone else, but I feel like I’m learning all the time and despite my moments of panic, I have yet to regret my decision to walk away from a 9-5 job.

My Plastic Free July Challenge

As a volunteer at this year’s Ocean Film Festival in Poole, I agreed to have a go at their Plastic Free July Challenge.

There were two options: Avoid the big 4 (single-use coffee cups, plastic bottles, drinking straws and single-use plastic bags) or go the whole hog and try to avoid buying anything in plastic for the whole month.

As I’ve already cut the big 4 out of my day-to-day life, I decided I’d have to go the whole way. I’m going to be totally honest - I failed. But not through a lack of trying.

There are just some products that it seems impossible to buy not wrapped in plastic - examples include toilet roll, toothpaste, toothbrushes, mushrooms and salad.

That said, just by thinking about it, and taking the time to look, there were quite a lot of products where I was able to move away from plastic - ketchup (glass bottle), oats (by purchasing them from a store that sold them in a paper bag, rather than a plastic one), butter (by opting for standard blocks wrapped in foil instead of the spreadable ones in a plastic tub), and teabags (picking the only product in a cardboard box that wasn’t also wrapped in plastic).

What I’ve realised through doing this challenge is just how ubiquitous plastic is in our society - I mean it’s even part of our geological record now. It is, quite literally, everywhere. And avoiding it as much as possible takes a really conscious effort.

There are some steps you can take that just seem like no-brainers to me, such as using canvas shopping bags instead of plastic ones, but when you can’t buy something without having plastic packaging, what do you do? Never buy another toothbrush? Pick your own mushrooms? Use newspaper instead of toilet roll?

It isn’t practical, or necessarily safe, and I don’t know what the answer is. What I do know is that we need to use less plastic and that if, for example, we all made a conscious effort to buy the products in glass bottles instead of plastic ones, the latter would eventually stop being produced.

It’s not going to be a quick fix (if there even is one at all), and much though I’d love it, I seriously doubt there will be any legislation to support plastic-free packaging, which is a shame given how well that’s worked for single-use carrier bags.

One of my biggest problems with plastic is that it doesn’t go anywhere. It may get recycled but more often than not it travels the planet in the oceans or on the wind and it pops up everywhere. I’m a huge fan of the #2minutebeachclean campaign and I do one most days when I’m walking the dog, picking up everything from water balloons and plastic bottles to polystyrene and broken beach toys.

Just one of my #2minutebeachcleans

But all that rubbish still has to go somewhere and sadly that’s landfill. Personally I think that’s better than it drifting around in the ocean and making its way into the food chain, but it’s far from a perfect solution.

If anyone else had a go at the Plastic Free July Challenge I’d love to know how you got on - or if you found any ingenious solutions to buying items that always come wrapped in plastic.