How I'm Coping With 'Lockdown' As A Freelancer

Well, who would have seen this coming?  

I'm writing this after 47 days of lockdown in the UK (not that I'm counting).

I know that there are much bigger issues at this time but I thought I'd share my experiences as a self-employed person during these troubling times.

When the UK went into full lockdown mode on the 24th of March all of my client work had already been on pause for a week or so. Completely understandable due to the nature of the projects that I work on. The majority of my projects are linked with events, and the cancellation of all major events and gatherings in the UK meant that nothing needed to be promoted.

Anyway, enough of the sob story. As I mentioned earlier, there's much bigger issues going on in the world.

Anyone who knows me will know that I love being busy. I hate stagnation and I find it really hard to 'do nothing'.

So with all this time on my hands, how have I managed to stay productive and not loose my mind? Well truthfully I haven't stayed productive, not every day anyway. And there's been days when my mind has not been in a good shape.

Here's a few things that I've been doing to stay busy, exercise the creative part of my brain and stay active:

Adapting my skills to generate some income and to keep my creative mind active:

I've re-found my love for woodwork recently. My day-to-day design work is essentially visual problem solving, so my brain is wired to enjoy solving problems creatively. Woodwork for me is basically another way to stimulate this. It also means that I can lock myself away in my 'man cave' with some music and a coffee and just distract myself from everything else.

And I've combined this with my passion for rock climbing in order to make wooden climbing holds and training equipment for the climbing community, who are now all stuck at home to do their training, instead of being able to climb indoors or outdoors.

I've decided to take these climbing products forwards as an addition to my work as a designer (more to come on that in the near future). I love creating things from wood, and if I can help out the climbing community in the process then that gives me so much joy.

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