If you're self employed in Worksop or working remotely from a Bassetlaw village, you've probably had the week. Three days of solo work. No meetings. No water cooler chat. No reason to leave the house. You finish on Friday and realise the only conversation you've had since Monday was with the man at the Co-op.
Self employed and remote workers in this area don't talk about this much. It's not a topic that comes up over a roast on Sunday. But the data is unambiguous.
Isolation isn't a personality flaw, it's a job hazard
Leapers, the freelancer mental health collective, runs an annual survey on the experience of self employed and remote workers. Roughly 89 percent of UK freelancers report some level of isolation. Around 86 percent say self employment has had some negative effect on their mental health.
That's not a small minority. That's almost everyone.
The problem is structural. When you work alone, the small social interactions that come for free in a workplace stop happening. There's no chat at the coffee machine, no quick catch up after a meeting, no unplanned conversation that turns into a useful idea. You don't notice them because they're tiny. But over a week, a month, a year, the cumulative effect of not having them is real.
Worksop's particular challenge
Bigger cities have layers that mitigate this. Coffee shops. Coworking spaces. Member's clubs. Industry meetups. If you're a freelancer in Sheffield or Nottingham, you can fall into a community without trying very hard.
In Worksop, the layers are thinner. There's Worksop Turbine, the council run business centre on the edge of town. There are a few serviced office providers. There are coffee shops on Bridge Place that work for an hour but not for a focused day.
What there hasn't been until now is a proper coworking space aimed at independent freelancers, remote workers, and small business owners. A space designed around the actual rhythm of self employed work, not around startups or the council's enterprise programmes. That's the gap Worksop Workspace fills.
You don't need to be best friends with the person two desks over. The benefit of working around other people is more subtle than that.
What changes when you work around other people
- The accountability of being seen working. Not in a surveillance way. In a "I said I'd send that proposal today and now there are humans here who've heard me say it" way.
- The unstructured conversations. Someone mentions a tool that solves a problem you've been wrestling with. A brief chat about pricing reveals you've been undercharging. The conversations bigger workplaces take for granted, that solo workers go without.
- The structure. Getting in by nine. Stopping for lunch. Wrapping up at five. The shape of a working day that home working tends to dissolve.
- The not being alone part. Even if you don't speak to anyone all day, the presence of other people getting on with their work changes the texture of the day. It's harder to feel cut off when you're not literally cut off.
The honest comparison between working from home and coworking goes into more detail on this. The short version: it's not about preferring one or the other. It's about giving yourself the option.
A practical step
If you've been solo for a while and you've been telling yourself the isolation thing isn't really a problem, it's worth sense checking that against how you actually feel by Friday. Most people who try a coworking day for the first time say two things. The first is that they didn't realise how much they needed it. The second is that they got more done in one day there than they'd managed all week at home.
Worksop Workspace is opening on Carlton Road. The hot desk is £12 a day, no commitment. The weekly option is £50. You can use it once a week, or every day, or just on the days when home is too much.
Working alone doesn't have to mean working alone.