032 Working Alone Safely and Effectively

Working alone in a remote cabin build sounds peaceful until you do the math: one body, two hands, heavy materials, sharp tools, and nobody around if something goes wrong. We talk through the practical reality of solo homesteading and off-grid construction, including why jobs that look “simple” on video often take triple the time in real life. The hidden cost is not motivation or grit, it’s all the engineering you have to do to replace a second person: jigs, levers, clamps, braces, rope rigging, and careful sequencing so you never get stuck holding a load with your tools out of reach. 

Then we get serious about safety. When you’re working alone with a chainsaw, on a roof, or under a suspended load, the margin for error is fundamentally different. I share the non-negotiables that make solo work survivable: keeping a satellite communicator (Spot beacon or Garmin inReach) on your body, not in the truck, using any cell service you can get for texts, and telling someone exactly where you’ll be and what you’re doing so a missed check-in actually means something. We also dig into why tasks like felling trees, roofing, and lifting heavy timbers demand slower decisions, bigger margins, and redundant rigging. 

The biggest takeaway goes beyond tools and technique: self-reliance is not self-sufficiency. If your whole system collapses when you get hurt, it’s fragile no matter how capable you are. We talk reciprocity, community, pride, and why the most resilient off-grid setups build redundancy in people the same way they build redundancy in gear. If this hit home, subscribe, share it with a friend who works solo, and leave a review with your best safety rule or hard-earned lesson.

Transcript

Why Solo Work Looks Simple

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Morning, everybody. Sean James here from My Self-Reliance. Welcome back to the cabin. Got a lot of questions. I get a lot of questions about working alone. The safety of it in particular, I would say, is people's biggest concern, but also why I do it and what the benefit is. So I've been thinking about what it actually costs to work alone. And not emotionally, but practically. It's an emotional component as well, obviously, but practically. There's things I need to do to stay safe and to get things done effectively, efficiently, and as quickly as possible. When you're doing most of the work yourself, you really have to be efficient because there's so much to do that you can easily get away from you. And it's almost impossible to catch up with the way the seasons run. This is a version of this life that looks from the outside pretty simple. Get some land and you get some tools and you just do the work. Sounds easy. In a lot of ways, it is just that. But the part nobody tells you about the part I had to learn mostly by getting it wrong is that everything that's easy with two people is hard or harder with one. Some things that are just a task with two people are actually dangerous with one. You've seen lots of examples of that on my videos over the years. So this episode is about that, the practical reality of building a loan, what it takes, what it costs, and the things I've had to accept about what I can't do myself, no matter how capable I am, no matter how good the tools are, no matter how long I've been at this. The log cabin, the one that I'm sitting in right now, the size of those logs, good example of something, though, that can be done by one person, which to me, though I look at it and I'm still shocked a little bit that I was able to pull that off. Looks like something that there's no way you could do without power equipment for one thing, if not at least a crew of men. I am just one body and two hands. Every piece of work on this property starts with that same math of one body and two hands. That's it. Everything I need to build, move, lift, cut, square, hold, and fasten has to happen within that constraint. When you have a second person, you divide the problem. One holds, one drives, one guides, one pushes, one steadies, one levels. It's not even about strength most of the time, it's about having a second point of contact while the first one acts.

Jigs, Clamps, And Better Planning

SPEAKER_00 2:28

Without that, you spend a significant portion of your working life building substitutes for that person that doesn't exist. What that looks like practically, you've seen me many times, I think, if you've been paying attention, is uh jigs and levers and clamps and braces and rope in places where rope has no business being typically. And it looks like a 20-minute setup to do a five-minute task. Because the setup is doing the job of the person who isn't there. If you couple that along with the camera, the filming that I do myself, basically you can imagine that it takes probably three times as long to do any of the tasks that you see me doing. I've built dedicated jigs just to hold a board at the right angle while I cut it. I've rigged temporary bracing to hold a wall panel in place while I moved around to fasten it. I've clamped things to things to other things in ways that look absurd just to get three points of contact on a problem that wanted four. The physics don't change is because you're alone. Beam is still just as heavy, a post still has to be plum, a ridge still has to align. What changes is that you have to engineer a way to achieve those things without anyone helping you achieve them. And that engineering takes time, materials, and thought every single time. I've also found that working alone changes how you plan. When you're working with someone, you can improvise at the point of the problem and you can discuss it with that person, figure out the best way to do something. So you can figure it out together in the moment. When you're alone, you have to think through the whole sequence beforehand because you can't hold the thing and also go get the tool you forgot. That happens often, like say hang pushing your wall up into place, and it's pretty good. You know, my hammer is even if it's just a foot out of reach, that's uh an issue. So that has to be planned for. You have to walk through it in your head first. Dry run it, figure out every point where you're going to need something and make sure it's within your reach before you start. So that discipline, that force pre-planning has actually made me a better builder for sure. Not because it's a virtue, but because I had no choice. We're gonna loan. Mistakes and sequencing are expensive. So you get good at sequencing. I get people asking all the time about um why I don't have a proper workbench. Well, the reason is that I I have I need you know 20 workbenches. I need to keep moving my work surface around and keep improvising and keep um creating new places to put material or to put tools because I need that um versatility that uh maybe you don't need when you just have one one workplace, for example, one spot that you're gonna be doing all your work on. I just move around. I have too many issues with uh material access and and just uh positioning something for that uh where that thing needs to be after I finish working on it. And that

Safety When Nobody Is There

SPEAKER_00 5:19

creates safety issues as well. So this is the part where you really need to pay attention because it's the part that really matters. Working alone in a remote location, especially doing physical work with heavy materials and sharp tools, the margin for error is different than it is anywhere else in Calvin or on a regular job site where there's other people working. Not slightly different, it's like fundamentally different. In any other workplace, if something goes wrong, there's someone there, someone who can call for help or apply pressure to a wound, drag you clear of the hazard, go for a vehicle, make a decision. That someone doesn't exist out here. Something goes wrong, it's just you and whatever capacity you have in that moment and whatever you thought to repair before you started. That's not hypothetical. It's the actual situation every time I pick up a chainsaw, climb onto a roof, work under something heavy, or fell a tree by myself. When you think about all the things I've done in my life alone, because I've always preferred to work alone and have often done it because there's nobody else available or nobody else willing. And over the last 10 or 11 years, it's primarily been I've been intensively working almost every day alone. So it's um amazing really that I have not got injured more often. First, before I start any task with real risk, my satellite communicator is nearby, so I have a spot beacon, and I also have a Garmin inreach, which is text um enabled, so I can text somebody or or I can press the uh SOS. So that's um helpful. When I do have cell phone service, and I don't have very good cell phone service, it's like one bar occasionally, depending on or depending on where I am on the property. That um I keep I keep with me too, because usually I can at least text. I probably very, very rarely can actually have a phone call, but I can usually get text to go through, and it's also an SOS as well as well. So I can't just keep that in the truck and I can't keep it on the workbench. It has to be on me. Doesn't matter if I'm 100 meters from the cabin or a mile from the cabin. If I can't walk out, I need to be able to call for help from wherever I land, and that device is as much a part of my toolkit as any other tool. It's just non-negoti non-negotiable. People have commented because they've seen my phone in my hip pocket or my uh cargo pant pocket, and it lights up, and they think, well, that's not self-reliance, or that's not very, very remote or uh analog, but that's my safety device. It's not like I'm sitting there scrolling on it and checking my social media accounts or something during the day. It's my safety. I also tell someone where I'm going to be and what I'm doing exactly. Not every time I go outside, but anytime the work involves a chainsaw, a height, a load, something I'm moving alone that's larger than it should be for one person. That's a canoe trip, fishing trip, you know, what my route is, so if I don't return where they can search for me. Because someone always knows it's usually my wife. Most of the time, it's exclusively my wife. That's the whole system, my whole safety system. Someone knows what I'm doing, approximately where I am, and roughly how long it should take. And if they don't hear from me, they know what that means. I also have one neighbor that they're often or usually home, I would say. They're in their 70s. They're um not within hearing distance, but I do have their phone number, so that would be the first responder. Very resourceful couple. They could they've been living off grid there for 27 years, I think it is now. And they have all the equipment and everything. So that would be my first uh responder, like I said. It would take anybody else quite a bit longer to to get um to my location if I did need assistance than if there was an emergency. Beyond

Trees, Roofs, And Heavy Loads

SPEAKER_00 9:23

the device, there's a whole category of tasks I approach differently alone than I would with a partner. Felling trees is a real obvious one. The calculus changes completely when you're by yourself. The escape route matters just that much more. The notch matters more, like accuracy in the felling. The assessment of the lean matters more. Because if the tree doesn't go where I planned, there's nobody out to ship, nobody to shout a warning. I I don't yell timber. There's nobody to pull me clear if I do have get caught under a tree. Nobody to go for help. So the margin you leave yourself has to be bigger. You work slower, you assess longer, you take the more conservative cut when there's any doubt at all. I would recommend to most people that probably don't fell trees alone if you can avoid it. Uh, roof work is another one. It's I grew I grew up on a roof. I'm as a sheet metal worker starting when I was what, 20 or 21? Worked as a sheet metal worker until I was 29 when I went into the office, but then I spent the next 20 years working on rooftops, like managing crews on rooftops. So I spent all the time climbing up ladders and being in dangerous situations. So I'm more capable than most at that, but it's still the most dangerous. It's one of the most dangerous professions in the world, roofing. I don't free climb on steep pitches with a line if I can help it, without a safety line and a harness or a belt. I know guys who do it, and I almost every one of them has fallen off a roof and has some long-term injuries as a result. And they're starting to show up in their older age since most of my friends and family are my age and older. I've done it myself when I was younger and stupid, and I've had some very close calls. But the math is simple. If I fall off a roof alone, I'm on the ground alone and I stay there until I can get myself out or someone finds me. It's not a risk I'm willing to take. So the line goes on almost every time, even for the short tasks, and even when it's inconvenient. Working under loads, I don't put myself in a position where a failure of a rope, a jack, or a bracer, a prop puts me under something that I can't get clear of. You double the rigging, you use redundant supports, you never rely on one point of failure when the when one point is all it takes. That you I would say the biggest, scariest example of that, and I did just bring on an apprentice, and I a brief uh temporarily I'm gonna tell you more about them, but it's just telling them showing them the tree that I had those those uh cables attached to where the stump was, because as soon as I finished that cabin, I noticed that tree had died while I was working there. And I should have noticed at the time that uh cable attached to that tree, the tree ended up literally falling over. I didn't even push it over or cut it down, it fell over after I was done the cabin. Any one of if that had have happened when I had one of those 800-pound logs above me, or even if it had fallen beside me and bounced off another log or a wall and hit me and would have done serious damage. So these aren't these safety rules, even though I do have a lot of safety training. It's not something I read somewhere because I'm applying it differently this time in this situation. If I get hurt badly enough that I can't function, this homestead basically stops. That would be the end of our homesteading journey, or certainly would it change what we're doing here. You know, the animals always still need feeding. The firewood still needs splitting, water still needs to move, and none of it happens because there is nobody else. Yeah, at time I do get some injuries. I tweak my back, usually from sitting in this chair at my computer, and then moving afterwards and goes out and it puts me back a little bit, or I get these some wrist injuries, some cuts, or right now it feels like I might have tennis elbow again, which I had when I built the first cabin ten years ago. So I gotta be careful. When I do get injured, you see me, you might notice uh people have pointed out they've seen me like stiff neck and not move my head very well. So I end up looking my age or looking older than my age on some of the tasks that I'm doing. When you're out for a couple weeks, it doesn't sound like much much, but two weeks on a homestead is uh in a season where work has to happen, like especially spring to fall, it comes at a real cost. That firewood that didn't get split becomes heat that's not available in the winter cooking. Section of fence that didn't get finished doesn't keep the deer out or the moose out, as you've seen in the garden. Projects that were behind before the injury and further behind after it. And all of that full knowledge that nobody was going to catch me up while I recovered that work as pause. It was just not happening, waiting for me to heal. That's a back tweak, that's a minor version. A broken arm or a leg or a serious cut, a fall that does real damage, a health episode, something cardiac, something sudden, something that takes you off your feet, not for two weeks, but for two months. That's a different category of problem entirely. I've thought about it. You have to think about it out here, and not in a dark way, just honestly. If something does happen to me that takes me out, well, for an extended period, it just wouldn't be acceptable to me or reasonable to ask somebody to step in and take care of the animals. Your cabin needs maintenance, talking to do, or whatever, damage from animals, pipes freezing in February. Here's

Self-Reliance Versus Self-Sufficiency

SPEAKER_00 15:15

the truth that took me a while to fully accept fully to deal with. And that's that self-reliance does not mean self-sufficiency. It actually never did. Those are different things, and I think a lot of people who are drawn to this life, including me for a long time, confuse them. Self-reliance means you develop real capability. You don't default to helplessness. You build skill and knowledge and the capacity to handle more than most people can handle by themselves. But nobody, not one person alive, is truly self-sufficient, full, not fully, not against everything, but when the body fails, not when the scale of the problem exceeds what two hands can do, not when you need a second opinion, a second pair of eyes, someone to carry the other end of something that doesn't move alone. Pretending otherwise, just it's not toughness, it's a blind spot. And blind spots can be expensive on a homestead. The image of self-reliance, the one most people carry, the one most people think, is that it's completely solitary, one person, independent, needing nothing from anyone. And I understand that why that image is appealing. Obviously, I've been drawn to that myself my entire life. Something honest and clean about the idea of standing on your own. But the longer I've been out here, the more clearly I see that that truly capable people, the ones who've been living this way for decades, not years, are not solitary. They're embedded people, not a crowd, not a network in a modern sense, but real relationships with real people who know their land, know their situation, and would show up if something went wrong. You have to be willing to do that for others as well. It's not weakness, that's wisdom. Think about what the old homesteading communities actually looked like: the barn raises, the harvest help, the neighbors who came when the roof needed work because everybody knew your roof would need work eventually, and somebody would come for theirs too. That wasn't charity, it was a system, a genuine, practical, deeply functional system for doing work that exceeded what any one household could do alone. We've lost most of that, unfortunately, and I think we've lost it in part because modern convenience made it unnecessary. You don't need your neighbor to help you split wood if you can buy it. You don't need someone to come set your fence post if you can hire a guy with a machine. That's why most people don't know their neighbors. That's cliche. You don't know your neighbors when you live in the city or in a suburban uh community. Often you don't know them, at least, or you don't know all of them like you would have in the past when you actually had a reliance. Like when I was a kid, my mother, I remember often she would be going to the neighbor to to uh borrow some sugar because she was baking something and ran out, and vice versa, they would do the same to her. Those things it's not something that existed for me and my wife and my family. I know we did not do that with our neighbors. Those conveniences are fragile, depend on money, on infrastructure, on supply chains. The neighbor relationship doesn't depend on any of those things, it depends on something older and more durable. Reciprocity. I help you when you need it, you help me when I need it. That's the whole contract. For me, practically, community fills gaps I can't fill alone. When I had little issues, I needed someone who could check check in on me. When I'm filling something large and genuinely uncertain, a second set of eyes changes the risk profile significantly. When a project needs to happen in a compressed time window, getting something roofed in before getting before winter sets in, or getting a structure standing before the weather turns. Two people can do it in a day. One person may take three or four days to do alone. Some tasks are two people might not double it, might add might make it more like 50% shorter time, like 25%. I mean, I mean, and uh other things actually do go two or three times faster because that extra hand is just that much more important or required on that task. There's a longer-term version of this that I think about more and more. If I were seriously incapacitated, like not for two weeks, but maybe two months, who would look after this place? Who would feed the animals, tend to the garden, cut the firewood, make sure pipes don't freeze, make sure the solar system uh electrical system keeps working? Who would make the decisions that that can't wait that typically I make? If the honest answer is nobody, that's something worth working on, not out of fear, it's just a practical matter. Same way you'd work on any gap in your preparedness. Building those relationships takes the same investment as any other skill. For me, I would say it's like more difficult, more of an investment. Time consistency, showing up when other people need it so that the relationship exists before you need to lean on it. You can build can't build community in an emergency, but to build it before the emergency, the same way you build any other kind of redundancy. That's you know, think about that. It takes uh takes some time and effort. Relationship uh maintenance is is uh not my strong suit, but it's it's absolutely essential to most people homesteading. Part of that is the pride. I want to name something I think gets in the way of this for a lot of people who are drawn to this kind of life, and that is that pride. It's not the healthy kind, it's the other kind, the kind that would rather fail alone than succeed with help. Kind that reads asking for assistance as admitting inadequacy. That makes accepting community feel like giving up on the ideal. I even get people commenting that way. They see me have help or use a tool, a power tool, or a piece of equipment. They're like, that's not you're not self-reliant, you're a fraud. That's not uh that's not practical, that's just fantasy. I had this, I still have it in smaller doses. Instinct that says I should be able to figure this out by myself, move it by myself, build it by myself. The reluctance to call someone, not because I don't need them, but because needing them feels like a bit of a concession. I guess I need to work on that. Like I said, I temporarily hired an apprentice from a community member, actually, somebody that we the son of a family that we um barter with and who we get um some of our farm supplies, our our um produce from uh their son. So that's part of my community. I did not want to ask for help, but anyway, I'll talk about that again in the future. Because that instinct will get you hurt, it'll cost you time and if it hardens into a principle. If you start believing that asking for help is failure, it will leave you genuinely isolated in ways that matter when they matter the most. The most capable people I know in this life are not too proud to ask. They're not too proud to say this is a two-person job and I'm going to find a second person. Not too proud to call someone more knowledge on a specific problem. And they're not too proud to admit when the scale of something exceeds what one person should carry alone. Doesn't mean waiting for that help, just means being willing to ask for that help and hope to get that help and to have built relationships enough or strong enough that you can get that help when you need it. But be willing, in my case, I know for sure that I'm always willing to be to do that project alone if necessary. And I'll figure out a way to do it. That's not weakness, that's accurate self-assessment. Accurate self-assessment is the foundation of every good decision you can make out here. Goal is never to need nothing, despite what people think it should be, I think I would say. Goal was to be capable and to be genuinely practically useful in the world, to be someone who can carry their share and sometimes more than their share. Well, knowing when the share requires more than one person to carry. There

Redundancy, Community, And The Next Build

SPEAKER_00 23:16

is something specific that working alone teaches you that you can't get any other way. Teaches you the actual limits of one person, not the theoretical limits, the actual ones. Once you hit the middle of a task and have to reckon within real time. I know how much weight I can move by myself, for example, not because I've read it somewhere, because I've tested it. I know how many hours of physical work I can sustain before my judgment starts to slip, before my energy level drops or my concentration slips. Know when the fatigue gets dangerous because I've pushed past it and I've seen what happens. I know which tasks genuinely can't be done alone, not in a way that's safe, not in a way that produces good work, because I've tried to do them alone and I did find that wall. That knowledge is valuable. It makes you honest, makes you makes your planning realistic instead of optimistic in ways that cost you. But it only comes from doing the work from the day that timber was too heavy from the afternoon the jig failed and you had to start over from the moment you were 15 feet up alone and realized the situation was worse than you had assessed from the ground. From the two weeks of moving like an old man after you listed something you just shouldn't have. Or because you didn't put your safety glasses on before you cut a piece of wood or cut chipped out a piece of stone. Those experiences aren't failures, they're the curriculum I've mentioned in the past. What they build over time is a kind of competence that isn't arrogant because you know exactly where your edges are, you're not guessing, and you know just as clearly where you need another person, and you're not embarrassed about it because you've earned the knowledge. So self-reliance is not about doing everything alone. Self-reliance does not have to be defined as one man alone against the world. I want to say that plainly and often because I think it's the most important thing I've learned from actually living this way. It's about developing real capability, real skill, a real relationship with the physical work of staying alive and keeping a place running, keeping a homestead, or keeping two homesteads running. It's about not being helpless by default, not outsourcing every problem, and not needing someone else to solve things you could learn to solve yourself. But also means being honest about the limits of one body. Means communication advice on you before you start the dangerous work. It means telling someone where you're going and what you're doing, especially on days that are going to be extra dangerous. It means double rigging the thing you're going under, like you're working underneath. It means building the jig that lets you work safely alone instead of skipping that stuff step because you're impatient. That's a danger. That's a that's a temptation always to just skip doing that because you think, well, I can that's gonna slow me down. I can get this done in one minute, and it's gonna take me five minutes to set something up to make it safe. Well, that's a good way to get caught. It does mean building community, not as a fallback and not as a backup plan, but an actual part of the design. It's something you invest in the same way you invest in any other essential system out here. So the homestead doesn't stop when you do, the animals don't stop needing feed, the cold doesn't stop because you're injured, the work doesn't wait. And you've built your life in a way where you're the only person who can keep it going. I've built something fragile. No matter how capable you are, no matter how capable I am, it is fragile. The most resilient systems have redundancy. You know this. I talked about it all the time when it comes to tools, to food stores, to heat sources. One is none, two is one. That principle does not stop at your equipment, it applies to people too. So build the skills, learn to work alone, get good at it, but also build the relationships. Find the people who understand this life, who are building something similar, who would show up when you needed it. And be the kind of person who would show up for them, too. It's not a compromise of the self-reliance ideal. That is the self-reliance ideal properly understood. Well, thanks for listening to this ramble in early morning, five o'clock in the morning as usual. I am going to make breakfast and head out. Um I'm gonna be working on the timber frame sugar shack, maple sugar shack that I started two years ago. That because I'm working alone and had to get on to other projects or that took um that were higher priority, I have not got this thing done. And it's got that timeline really before winter to be completely closed in so I can get all my supplies in there, including dry wood, so that when March rolls around, I'm ready to make me sugar and not be scrambling last minute. And I've um I have hired this this 18-year-old guy to help me out for the next two weeks to get make a little bit more progress on that. So when he goes back to his normal job or his normal life, that um I can get the rest of it done alone. So, like I said, I'll that's community, but I'll talk about that more in the future. So that's it. Thanks for listening, thanks for watching. If you're watching this on YouTube, and I look forward to see you back here at the cabin next time. Take care.