Do you prefer working alone or with others?

[Cheeky Shaun]

Hot take: the people who say they always prefer working alone have usually just been burned by a bad team and haven't fully processed it yet. I've been that person. Had a genuinely dreadful eighteen months working with people who had wildly different standards, communication styles, and commitment levels, and came out the other side utterly convinced I was a solo operator by nature. Took me about two years of solo freelance work to realise I was just protecting myself from a specific kind of frustration rather than expressing a genuine preference.

Good collaboration is a completely different animal from the committee-by-default stuff most workplaces call teamwork. Real collaboration is when everyone in the room is genuinely adding something the others don't have, when there's enough trust to say "that idea isn't working" without it becoming political, and when the end product is something none of you could have made alone. That's actually exhilarating and I'd take it over solo work any day. The problem is it's rare. Most "collaboration" is just accountability structures and meetings dressed up as creative partnership.

That said, I do have a category of work I will defend to my last breath as being better done alone: anything requiring sustained deep concentration. Flow state is real, it takes time to get into, and it's extremely fragile. Open plan offices and constant pinging destroyed a generation of knowledge workers' ability to do genuinely hard cognitive work and we collectively agreed to call it "staying connected." I can collaborate on what to build and how to build it, but the actual building? Leave me alone for three hours and come back.

Funny how this question also reveals a lot about what kind of work someone does. Writers, programmers, researchers, designers tend to land more solo. Salespeople, project managers, teachers tend to land more collaborative. It might be less about personality and more about what your actual job rewards

[RoughDaemon]

I definitely lean toward working alone most of the time. There's something really satisfying about getting into a flow state without interruptions or having to explain every tiny decision.

That said, when I do collaborate with the right people, it can seriously elevate the final outcome

[Wendy5]

I prefer working alone for speed, but I prefer working with others for quality. It's a constant tradeoff depending on deadlines and stakes.

If something is important, I'll always want at least one other set of eyes on it

[Midnight Georgia]

What a surprisingly rich question this turned out to be because I sat down to write a quick reply and ended up thinking about it for longer than I expected. My honest answer is that I prefer working alone but I'm better at working with others, and those being different things has caused me no small amount of confusion over the years.

Preference and performance diverge in interesting ways. I find solo work more comfortable, more pleasurable, less draining. I can go at my own pace, follow tangents, backtrack without having to explain myself, and produce something I feel full ownership over. It suits my brain. But when I look back at the work I'm actually most proud of, the stuff that surprised even me, it almost always involved at least one other person at some key stage. A collaborator who reframed the whole problem. A critic who told me the thing I thought was finished actually wasn't. A partner who contributed something I genuinely couldn't have generated myself.

So I've tried to design my working life around getting the best of both rather than choosing. Do the generative and drafting work alone, bring people in for structured critique and iteration, then retreat to refine alone again. It's a rhythm rather than a binary. The times this breaks down are when circumstances force sustained collaboration without the alone-time recovery periods, and that's when I start to fray at the edges.

The introverted versus extroverted framing people usually reach for here is a bit too blunt as an explanation. It's really more about cognitive load and where you draw creative energy from. Some people generate better ideas by bouncing them off others in real time. I generate better ideas by sitting quietly and then having them tested by others afterwards. Neither is superior, they're just different engines that need different fuel.

I'll also say that age and experience have shifted me slightly toward valuing collaboration more than I used to. Younger me thought needing other people's input was a weakness. Current me recognises it as just... how good work gets made reliably rather than occasionally

[Coder22]

I like working alone for the initial messy thinking phase. It's where I can be wrong without judgement and try weird ideas.

Then I prefer bringing others in to refine and challenge it

[ScarletDaemon]

I think it depends heavily on the task. Creative stuff I prefer alone at first, then I like feedback later. Technical problem solving is similar for me.

Jumping straight into group work from zero often slows me down more than it helps