Avoiding Burnout as a Freelancer

“The road to success and the road to burnout are the same for too many people,” a friend mine, a leadership coach, recently said to me.

This struck me as one of those truths that you have never articulated but feels so obvious once someone has said it to you.

I’ve been thinking about burnout a lot lately because it’s been a challenging year with an international move (from Spain back to the US) and some medical problems. So I did what I always do and started reading.

When You’re the CEO

The first book I picked up turned out to be about institutional causes of burnout and how CEOs and human resources departments can change their work cultures to help prevent it. At first I thought this was not information I needed because I don’t run a large multinational corporation.

But then I realized that if I did, would I have one person (me) doing all the marketing, running the website (and troubleshooting the technical issues), writing the content, developing the classes, teaching the classes, and on and on?

No, of course not.

This was an “Aha!” moment for me. Even though I can usually complete my necessary work in a reasonable number of hours a day, the cognitive load of that many responsibilities is enormous – and it doesn’t even take into consideration the challenges of my personal life, such as needing to support my daughter’s complex medical needs, do the laundry and cook the meals, not to mention spending time on my creative work.

Creating a Time Budget

My friend the leadership coach suggested that I start addressing the “so many things to do!” problem by making a time budget. Even though I don’t work excessively, she thought this might be an enlightening task. “People have a tendency to underestimate what they’re actually doing,” she said. “And you only have twenty-four hours in a day. You can’t accomplish twenty-five hours worth of things. So, allocate your time according to your priorities.”

I started by (as she advised) writing down all of my weekly tasks. I ended up with a list eight pages long of tasks like “write two blog posts.” And that wasn’t even breaking the task into its actual steps of generating an idea, researching the idea, working out the SEO/keywords, writing a rough draft, revising and polishing the draft, identifying (and sometimes making) an image to go with it, selecting categories, and scheduling the post.

So it’s not really two things (“write two blog posts”), it’s more like fifteen or twenty things.

Seeing this in cold, hard writing made a big difference to me. And despite what it sounds like, this isn’t a post about “hire more help!” because that’s not in the cards right now. What helped instead was to see how to reduce some of these tasks, or at least to minimize their cognitive load.

Steps for Reducing Cognitive Load

I looked at my list of tasks and worked out an overall plan for dealing with them more effectively.

1. Identify recurring problems that can be solved and solve them. For example, students were reaching out to me because they weren’t getting password-reset emails from the website. These only took a few minutes to solve, so it never registered as a time-consuming problem to me. But it added to the cognitive load: every time someone reached out about this problem I had to stop everything to fix it. So, I went to my website developer and worked out a way to make those emails more deliverable. And the problem has gone away. The time savings isn’t great – perhaps fifteen minutes a week – but the reduction in cognitive load has been enormous.
2. Identify insoluble problems and stop trying to solve them. My daughter has a complex medical situation, and I can’t fix it. It creates problems that crop up out of nowhere. I never know when one will happen. Accepting that I don’t have control over this has just let me shut the door on worrying about it. What can I do? Nothing. All I can do is take a breath and deal with a problem when it arises.
3. Batch work. This has been a huge time saver for me, plus it reduces mental fatigue. I give feedback on all student assignments at one time rather than piecemeal here and there as the assignments come in. I write and post several blog posts in the same session. I answer all emails that have come in at specific times of day and don’t answer them outside of those times. This allows me to stay focused and complete the work faster and without distractions.
4. Establish minimum viable marketing. I’ve talked about this elsewhere, but one of my favorite concepts is “minimum viable marketing.” These are the marketing tasks I have to complete each week or Club Ed starts to lose business. But once I’ve completed them, I’m done. I don’t have to do more unless I want to and have the time. This has helped reduce the cognitive load of “there’s more I could be doing.” (There’s always more. It never ends, so you have to end it.)
5. Establish minimum viable tasks. I started doing minimum viable marketing a while back and I can’t believe how long it took me to apply the same concept to tasks. Each week, I identify the minimum viable tasks to accomplish for that week, such as replying to email, giving feedback to students, and making a specific amount of progress on course development. Anything else I accomplish after that is gravy. This also helps to reduce cognitive load.
6. Integrate self-care into the work day. This helps relieve stress even as I’m working. I always stop to take a lunch break and don’t try to work during it. I always go for a walk in the afternoon, then return to my desk feeling refreshed.
7. Limit the workday. When the clock says it’s five p.m., I make a note about where I’ve stopped and close down the laptop and get on with my life. It’s too easy to linger at work, looking like you’re accomplishing something when you’re really not.

These steps have helped me reduce the stress of juggling a complicated worklife. I hope you’ll find them helpful, too.

~~~

Jennifer Lawler has been a freelance editor for more than twenty-five years and has been teaching editing skills for more than fifteen years. She is the founder of Club Ed LLC.