How Freelancers Work from Home During the Pandemic

As the pandemic requires everyone to work from home, even veteran freelancers are feeling the strain. Eleven freelance media workers share new routines for the COVID era

A few weeks into the pandemic, I asked my therapist how her other patients were faring — the ones who were healthy, nonessential workers and could stay home. Were they all floating in a vacuum of timelessness and uncertainty like me? “Actually, the ones who have a routine are doing OK,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

Routines can conjure up a capitalist cult of productivity, reserved for life-hackers, Mark Wahlberg, and Highly Effective People who drink green smoothies and jog at sunrise. They’re also, by their unchanging nature, kind of boring. But that steadiness provides a structure that many artists say they find indispensable.

Writers such as Maya Angelou and Haruki Murakami have been famously devoted to their daily habits. Angelou rented a hotel room, in which she kept “a dictionary, a Bible, a deck of cards, and a bottle of sherry,” and where she wrote every day from 7am until 2pm. When Murakami is working on a novel, he starts writing at 4am then takes a break to run 10 kilometers in the afternoon. In a 2004 interview in The Paris Review, Murakami said, “The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”

By reducing the number of decisions made in a day, the theory goes, more brain power can be devoted to the creative work of writing. Because routines create a sense of structure and purpose, they can help with symptoms of attention deficit and depression. They also lessen anxiety by increasing predictability and providing a sense of control — important in a world that feels like it’s spinning out.

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Some writers were already working from home prior to the pandemic, but they weren’t used to having company. Lisa Rabasca Roepe is a full-time freelancer who is now joined by her husband and teenage daughter at their home in Arlington, Virginia. “I feel like I’m running a co-working space,” she says.

Like Roepe, Lizzie Wade, a science journalist based in Mexico City, was used to working from home, and her daily routine hasn’t changed drastically. From 10am to 2pm, she writes, conducts phone interviews, and attends Zoom calls with her colleagues at Science, where she is a contributing correspondent. At 2 pm, Wade and her husband break for a big lunch, which is typically the largest meal of the day in Mexico. At 4 pm, she gets back to her desk and works for a few more hours before calling it a day.

While she tries to stick to her schedule, Wade doesn’t allot specific hours for specific activities. “Right now, it’s just kind of a work blob and I do whatever is most urgent or whatever most strongly calls to me. To a certain extent, that flexibility is necessary for a journalist, but it can also make my attention feel very fragmented in a way I really dislike,” she says.

Without a spatial boundary between home and work, it can be difficult to clock in and clock out psychologically. A lot of writers have had to create cues to shift between tasks. “Chai and coffee start the workday and dinner ends it. Otherwise I’d frantically cycle between my day job and personal tasks all day, feeling like I’m trying to do everything and accomplishing nothing,” says Andy Bandyopadhyay, who works during the day at a nonprofit and spends evenings writing his memoir and working on a series of essays about queer sexuality.

Victoria Law, a full-time freelance writer who lives in Manhattan with her teenage daughter, has only recently adopted a quarantine routine. She says she keeps it loose depending on the day’s requirements, getting up around 9 am. She drinks coffee, checks her emails, and scrolls Twitter for news before diving into reporting, writing, and editing by around 11 am. Law writes about women’s incarceration, and the subject matter sometimes requires her to work at night.

“If I’m working on a prison story based on the west coast…I often interview family members and (unpaid) advocates when they get home from work, have eaten dinner and/or fed their kids dinner, and finished their household and family responsibilities,” she says. “This often entails starting my phone interviews at 9:30, 10 pm, and sometimes even as late as 11 pm.”

Jacquelyn Kovarik, who is currently staying with her mom in South Scottsdale, Arizona, says she’s most productive between 11 pm and 4 am. “I agonized a long time (about the first month of quarantine) with trying to make myself a ‘normal schedule,’” she says. “Recently I have let go of trying to do that, and it has been much better. Nights when I have insomnia, I just read and write instead of trying to fight it.”

Like Kovarik, Kate Morgan schedules interviews for the afternoons, but otherwise does most of her writing from 9 pm to 2 am every night. She lives in a rural community in Pennsylvania and spends the daylight hours cleaning chicken coops, weeding vegetable gardens, and tending bees.

Angelica Frey lives in Brooklyn and doesn’t stick to a strict schedule. She does some work in the morning then often takes a break in the afternoon. “I take time to just do my own thing, then experience a spurt of productivity from 8 to 11 pm,” she says. When she finds that she’s entered the depths of doomscrolling on social media, Frey heads to the kitchen. “There’s nothing like cooking an elaborate meal that requires you to get your hands sticky and dirty to keep you away from the screens,” she says. She makes recipes posted by two former local Italian TV stars who were convicted for “selling products that would pertain to the wellness industry” under false claims of their efficacy. “Alas, it was the 90s and woo-woo was not in fashion,” Frey says.

In addition to cooking, many writers use exercise to anchor their days and create a sense of normalcy. Wade does yoga in the evening; Law takes an online martial arts class four times a week; and Julia Pugachevsky, a freelancer in Brooklyn, goes on runs in the morning.

“When the pandemic started, I got less and less into it because running with a mask was uncomfortable and it generally stopped feeling like the relaxing, meditative thing I rely on it to be,” she says. Lately, though, she’s been getting back into it. “This week was the first week I [ran] consistently and I’ve felt an enormous difference in my mood,” she says.

Before quarantine began, Pugachevsky’s routine consisted of going to her part-time job at a small start-up three days a week and writing at local coffee shops the rest of the time. Now, she’s limited to working from the kitchen table, the couch, or the bed in the one-bedroom apartment she shares with her partner. Given the close quarters, they’re careful to carve out alone time in the form of solo walks and single park hangs. “It’s so easy to feel co-dependent and snippy when you’re around each other 24/7,” she says. They’re also intentional about the time they do spend together, making sure to still have date nights even when they can’t go out.

Pugachevsky’s new work routine doesn’t involve much virtual face time with colleagues, and she misses co-working coffee dates with fellow freelancers. “As much as people complain about mandatory Zoom meetings (which I’m sure I’d hate too), I also get a little jealous. I have to make more of a concerted effort to have a good amount of human contact during the day.”

Since her roommate moved out to quarantine with family in Michigan, Sruthi Darbhamulla has felt isolated in her Chicago apartment. She calls her family in India and England every day, since she says it’s “the only way to prevent myself from feeling completely unmoored.” Darbhamulla started a full-time job as a copywriter at a law firm less than two weeks before everything shut down, and has become devoted to to-do lists while adjusting to her new position. “Just having a detailed plan to guide me through a day makes me feel at least momentarily in control,” she says.

For parents who have had to establish new routines for both themselves and their kids, the changes triggered by the pandemic have been especially challenging. Jessica Friedmann, a freelance writer and editor in Braidwood, Australia who is currently working on her first novel, used to plan her work schedule around her son’s school hours, writing while he was away. “I feel like that window of time was really hard-won after the toddler years, and it’s been frustrating and disorienting having to give it up,” she says.

Steph Auteri is the mother of a 5-year-old and also worked around her daughter’s school schedule. “Now, my daughter is always at home and I’m forced to simultaneously work and co-manage her distance learning,” she says. She shares parenting duties with her husband, who also works from home, and they’ve set up a fixed schedule to manage the extra responsibility.

The schedule helps, but she says, “I’ve had to learn to let go of absolute control. I had to become comfortable with the prospect of, say, interviewing people out on my front stoop while also supervising my daughter’s chalk art.”

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A few months into the pandemic, many people have developed a new rhythm working from home. But in this new normal — if you’re lucky to have avoided the direct impacts of the pandemic so far — it can be easy to slip into “shoulds” and shame around productivity. Mental health and economic strain remain significant stressors.

“I often explicitly tell myself, ‘Aim for the bare minimum,’” says Wade. “It’s a lot easier and more productive to improve upon the bare minimum than allow yourself to be paralyzed by the reality that you will never write a perfect story, much less a perfect first draft.”

“The bare minimum is enough,” she adds. “That’s the mantra I think more of us could have both in writing and in life, especially right now.”

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