Letter No. 35 [burn-out]
Dear Friend,
It’s been a bit of a month. By bit, I mean completely overwhelming—emotionally, mentally, and physically. There have been family things, business things, growing studio things, and project things, and they’ve all piled up to form a big, formidable mess. Still, it hasn’t been a bad month—I’m sure you know what I mean.
I’ve been reaching the end of each day and being so worn out that I feel I don’t have energy to do anything, and as creators, this is a pretty dangerous place to be. I talked a little about filling your creative well in a previous letter, but I wanted to address the aspect of balancing work and life and prioritizing between different work projects.
Why are you feeling burn-out?
When I get to this point (which is, honestly, too often), I try to stop and ask myself this. Is it because my eyes are bigger than my stomach and I’ve piled too many things onto my plate, or is it because of circumstances out of my hands? For the latter, we don’t have control over those circumstances, but we can definitely choose how we respond:
can you scale back on your projects to make everything more manageable?
do you need to take a temporary break from your work to solve an issue or get rest/help? I’ve had to learn to show myself some grace with this—I’m learning not to beat myself up for actually setting aside work for family things. Your mental and creative health will be better for it.
can you reach out to a community to lighten the load or find people in your same circumstances? I often struggle through things alone when I absolutely don’t need to—there are people in your same field who are experiencing the same (or similar) difficulties…don’t be afraid to reach out.
If your burn-out is from your work:
Sometimes I really feel like trying to juggle wearing all the caps of an entrepreneur is like this photo (except flames out of control and my hair singed, a glint of desperation in my eyes). There’s always something more I could be doing, and not enough time to do it all. AND, I feel like if I’m not doing everything every day, I’m not going to make it. There’s my fear of failure taking center stage.
One of the most helpful things you can do is to step back and analyze where you’re putting your energy, and why. Here are a few steps I go through:
write a list of everything you’ve committed to right now. Then put it aside and ask yourself this question: What am I truly pursuing? What is the bigger picture end-goal? What do I love doing, what can I not live without?
Now look back at your list and divide it into things you absolutely have to do—things that point you toward that big dream—and cross off the things that pull you away from it. You don’t have to abandon them completely, but they might need to be postponed or minimized for the moment.
Look at the shortened list of absolute commitments. Is it still too much? Can you minimize these in any way? Possible solutions could be re-organizing/regrouping tasks, shifting the time you spend between them, or removing a few more. Sometimes it’s more a matter of us learning to say “no.” Trust me, I struggle with this one.
I can often stop at this stage, because I’ve weeded out the things that have been causing me stress. Even if there are uncertainties or hard things in my list, I know that they’re serving a purpose and that I can manage them. If you still don’t feel this way, there are a few extra things you can consider.
Extra ways to organize/manage your work:
Break your commitments up into smaller workloads. For example, if you’re writing a blog post every week, you can brainstorm ideas one day for fifteen minutes, choose and research an idea for an hour the next day, write your blog the third day, and edit/post it the fourth day. Then it’s all spread out in smaller chunks.
Can you delegate any of your workload to anyone else? Taxes, bookkeeping, management, social media marketing, household/home chores/maintenance?
If you don’t already, make time in your week for a day completely away from your work. Do something on this day that gets your creative juices flowing and gives you rest.
If you have any ways that you manage your workload, I’d love to hear them! And hopefully you found some of these helpful too. :)
Until next week,
Tara