How To Stay Sane Working From Home And Have A Social Life?

Working from home has many advantages, but sometimes downsides can overwhelm you. Today we’ll talk about one of the main problems freelance writers face - the lack of social interactions. We’ll share working from home tips and explain how to get a social life if you spend most of your days alone.

No One Warned You About The Lonely Work From Home

Humans are social beings. Even introverts need human interaction and face-to-face communication sometimes. If you spend your days alone at home, feelings of loneliness and sadness creep in. And from there it’s just a couple of steps towards anxiety, depression and even panic attacks. Your mental health can deteriorate and sap your motivation to work. As a result, you won’t be able to complete orders in time; you will get fines and lose your freelance job. Before the situation becomes untenable, learn how to stay sane working from home and how to have a social life as a freelance academic writer.

How To Have A Social Life Working From Home?

If you don’t know how to balance work and life, our working from home advice will help you get more human interaction. You don’t have to follow every recommendation. Pick one that seems the most promising and give it a test-run. Once you have integrated a new habit into your daily routine, you can work on the next advice.

Use Social Media As Intended

If you recall the dawn of social media, you should remember that their original purpose was to help people get in touch with each other easier. So instead of wasting hours on Twitter and Instagram, use Facebook to contact your friends. Don’t scroll through the feed, go to the messenger and talk to the people you have not seen in a month. If Facebook sucks you in for hours on end, use email or Skype instead. This way you won’t be tempted to read unnecessary information and waste valuable time, but still get in touch with your friends.

Once you establish contact, don’t stop there. Set up video calls and real-life meetings. Internet communication can only go so far in curbing your loneliness.

Network With Other Freelance Writers

Look up local freelancer communities and join them to talk to the people with similar interests and problems. You will have at least one shared topic, and you won’t feel shy even at the first meeting. There are many websites to find people with similar jobs or interests. Start with meetup.com, where you can locate communities across most countries and cities. And if you find none of the meetups close by, you can always create your community starting with other freelance writers.

Take Your Workplace Public

While many freelancers ask how to get a social life, most of them forget that their workplace is portable. If you work on a laptop, you can use it anywhere to set up a field office in a coffee shop, library or even on a park bench if the weather allows. Even two hours a day spent in a lively place surrounded by people can make your loneliness abate.

In case you can’t work in a noisy and crowded environment, seek local coworking spaces. For a small fee, you will get a comfortable workplace with Wi-Fi, snacks, and refreshments. As a bonus, you will get to meet other freelancers working remotely from home and looking to have a social life. You might meet interesting people in different freelance fields and make new friends who will motivate you to work more efficiently to have more time for social engagements.

Plan Your Social Interactions

If you have been working remotely from home for a year or more, you realize the importance of planning. Unless you set up the tasks every day, you will get nothing done, and your income will dwindle into nothing. So if you are wondering how to balance work and life, plan your social engagements the same way you do your work tasks.

Decide how many times a week you want to meet with friends and how much time you will spare for every meeting. If none of your friends are freelancers, you will need to organize your day around their work schedule. For instance, if most of your acquaintances work nine to five, you should do most of the work in the morning and afternoon to leave the evenings free to go out with friends. Likewise, your weekends should be open, if your friends work five days a week.

Avoid inviting friends over or visiting their apartments since you stay cooped up all day long as it is. Instead, plan outings to your favorite cafe or bar, go to a nightclub occasionally or plan a picnic. A dinner plus movie combo is not only appropriate for dates, you can have as much fun with your friends. The more excitement you get during social engagements, the less lonely you will feel working remotely from home.

Bonus Working From Home Tips

1. Don’t work in your pajamas, dress in comfortable street-appropriate clothes so you could hop out to the store or a meeting on a 5-minute notice.
2. Try new things, learn extra skills, and working in groups will broaden your social circle and give you a positive boost.
3. Work hard to free up more time for going out, meeting new people and upholding your social engagements.
4. Agree to most invitations you get as after a few negative answers people will stop inviting you and your social circle will shrink.
5. Turn your brain off work once you step aside from your computer, concentrate on the people around you.

We hope we have provided you with actionable advice on how to get a social life working as a freelance academic writer. Even if right now the prospects of going out and meeting people seems daunting, give our working from home tips a try. Remember that you can’t dedicate your whole life to writing papers if you want to be happy.