The seven-day do things alone challenge

All seven days are on this page. There is nothing to sign up for and no email to give — which should not be a selling point, and is, because most pages offering this challenge will not tell you what is in it until you hand something over. It starts at ten minutes on Monday and finishes at a table for one on Sunday.

How it works

One thing a day, seven days, escalating. Each day names the activity, what counts as having done it, and its difficulty on a fixed one-to-five scale: a one is ten minutes where nobody is looking, a three is being visibly alone for a while. The week runs from ones up to a three, which is a real jump but a survivable one over seven days.

Two rules. Do them in order, because the order is the point. And each day, before you go, write down how nervous it makes you out of ten — then write the number down again afterwards. Fourteen numbers by Sunday. That is the part that makes this a week of practice rather than a week of errands.

Day 1

Difficulty 1 of 5 Order a coffee and drink it in the cafe, alone. Sitting in counts. A takeaway cup on the way to work does not.

Ten minutes, and the only thing that makes it count is that you sit down. Pick a quiet hour and a place where nobody knows you. The temptation on day one is to take it away and tell yourself it was close enough. It was not.

Day 2

Difficulty 1 of 5 Walk for twenty minutes with your phone in your pocket. No music, no podcast, no screen. Just the walk and whatever is around you.

Nobody is watching this one, which is what makes it interesting. It is not about other people at all; it is about whether you can be unaccompanied by anything for twenty minutes. Most people find this harder than day one and are surprised by that.

Day 3

Difficulty 1 of 5 Buy yourself a bunch of flowers and carry them home through town. Choose them at the counter, say they are for you if asked, and walk home with them in plain view rather than in a bag.

The first day with an audience. Carrying flowers you bought yourself, visibly, is a small public admission that you are doing something nice for yourself alone, and the discomfort is out of all proportion to the act. It also passes within a street.

Day 4

Difficulty 2 of 5 See a matinee at the cinema, alone. Buy one ticket, sit in the middle, stay until the credits finish.

Two hours in public on your own, and the easiest two hours you will find, because the room is dark and everybody faces one direction. Book online and arrive five minutes before, not twenty-five. The longer version covers which showing and which seat.

Day 5

Difficulty 2 of 5 Make small talk with whoever is serving you at the till. Ask them how their day is going, listen to the answer, and say one more thing back before you pay.

The first day that requires speaking, and the day most lists of this kind leave out entirely. Being comfortable alone and being able to talk to a stranger are two different nerves, and a week that only trains the first one leaves you quietly avoidant of the second. One sentence, one reply, one more sentence.

Day 6

Difficulty 2 of 5 Spend a whole evening offline. From the moment you get home until you go to bed.

Deliberately placed the night before the hardest day. An evening with nothing to scroll is the closest thing to a rehearsal for sitting at a table with nothing to do, and it will tell you honestly how much of your comfort with being alone is actually comfort with a screen.

Day 7

Difficulty 3 of 5 Eat dinner somewhere with tablecloths, alone. A proper restaurant, a proper table, and you stay for the whole meal.

The one everybody was thinking about all week. Book a table rather than walking in, which removes the only genuinely awkward moment. Order more than you think you are allowed to. Stay for the whole meal even if you finish in twenty minutes. The full guide to this one has the script for the door and what to do while you wait.

What to do with the fourteen numbers

Lay them out in pairs and look at two things.

First, the gap within each day. The after-number is almost always lower than the before-number, and the size of that gap is a measure of how much worse you expected the thing to be than it was. That gap is the actual subject of this week.

Second, the drift across the week. Day one's before-number and day seven's before-number are not comparable, because day seven is a harder task. What is comparable is the same task repeated, which is why the week ends rather than continuing: seven different things done once each is a start, not a practice.

After day seven

Slow down. A daily cadence works for a week because everything is small, and then it stops working, because at level three and above you need a week to book the thing and to want to do it. Once a week is the sustainable rhythm and it is also the honest one — a streak you are protecting makes you pick easy missions.

The other thing to do is repeat. Do day seven again in a fortnight, at a different restaurant, and write the numbers down. The second and third attempt at the same thing is where the before-number actually falls, and that fall is the only real evidence any of this is working. Then take a level 2 or 3 you have not tried from the full list across the seven categories, and keep going.

Or let Solo Era run it

One mission a week, assigned rather than chosen, on the same one-to-five ladder. It keeps both numbers, draws the line over months, and ticks each mission off permanently. An iPhone app.

Questions about the challenge

What if I miss a day?

Pick it up the next day. There is nothing to reset and no streak to lose, and the reason there is no streak is that protecting one makes people choose the easy version of a mission. A seven-day challenge that takes ten days is a completed seven-day challenge.

Can I swap a day for something else?

Yes, as long as the replacement is the same difficulty and from a different category to the days around it. Swapping day five for another day of being quietly alone is the one substitution to avoid — speaking to somebody is the day people most want to trade away, which is a fair sign it should stay.

Is there a 30-day version?

Not one worth writing. Thirty consecutive days of solo activities either repeats itself or escalates faster than nerve actually moves. The honest thirty-day version is four missions, one a week, each a rung higher than the last — which is simply what happens after this week ends.

I did day one and it was fine. Can I skip ahead?

Do day two and three anyway; they take half an hour between them and they are not the same skill. If the whole first half of the week is genuinely easy, start again from day four next week and add a level 3 from the graded list.

After the seven days, keep going at a weekly pace: build a free 4-week comfort zone challenge, one step a week, each a rung higher.