One of my main goals for 2021 is to produce a post a week for sylviesoul.com.

As I mentioned in my previous post about goal setting, I came close to achieving a post a week in 2019, but fell woefully short in 2020, despite being laid off for five months that year.

And it certainly wasn’t due to lack of productivity. Quite the contrary; I was easily writing more content last year than I had ever before.

But my focus wasn’t so much on creating content as it was on making money. I spent the majority of 2020 writing for other people, for other websites. In 2020 I directed so much of my energy towards these types of projects that I experienced writing burnout.

What is Burnout?

Burnout is a form of mental exhaustion that prevents you from proceeding with a task or hobby that you once loved.

Not quite a complete mental breakdown, it’s this unpleasant feeling of complete fog and creative bankruptcy. You may WANT to create more, but mental blocks are erected that make progress physically impossible.

I had a case of writing burnout in January 2020. I was writing for a site that expected three 1500-words articles a week, all while I was still working a full-time job.

At first I thought it would be feasible (there are people on this site that crank out over 15 articles a month for pay bonuses; surely I can complete a measly 3 in a week!), but after six weeks at this breakneck production speed I had had enough.

The editor I reported to even allowed me to cut back to one article a week, but the burnout was real. I COULD NOT write for this company anymore, I just couldn’t. And so, I cut ties at the start of February and only started pitching again when I was furloughed from my job in late May.

The point I’m trying to make is this: burnout is no joke. It’s a heavy sensation that weighs on your brain and leaves you in some sort of insidious mental purgatory, where you want to write but something is holding you back.

Writing burnout is different from writer’s block; you may have a ton of ideas that you want to share, but when you sit in front of the computer, you freeze up, unable to perform. Unable to think straight.

I’ve felt like this before, and I decided I never wanted to go through it again. Therefore, I’d like to share three helpful tips to writers so that they can avoid succumbing to creative burnout.

Understand Your Goals

In anything that you do, whether it’s writing, losing weight, training for a running competition, etc., it’s important to hammer down exactly why you are accomplishing certain tasks. Just because you are “busy” doesn’t mean you are being “productive”.

You can choose to plan out every second of your free time, but if the activities aren’t conducive to you achieving your goals, is any work really getting done?

Remember: will it make the boat go faster? Be intentional with how you spend your time; if it’s not bringing your closer to your goals, replace it with something else or do it later.

Know Your Limits

There’s a popular anti-gambling slogan in Canada that goes like this: Know Your Limit, Play Within It.

I feel the saying can be reworked to also apply to your creative output threshold. In other words: Know Your Limit, WRITE Within It.

I update my site once a week because I learned early on that I could produce a good quality post of about 1000 words in a week’s time. Despite that knowledge, I ignored the limits of my writing capacity when I agreed to write 3 articles a week, at 1500 words. Naturally, the quality of my writing suffered and I wasn’t happy with my output.

That isn’t to say I couldn’t eventually improve to produce 4500 words in seven days, but given my current circumstances (working a job, building my brand), I’m aware I’d have to make some sacrifices to make that writing output feasible. At the moment, I don’t think the return on investment is worth the shift.

And speaking of ROI…

Prioritize Your Time

When I wrote the posts for the company, my attention was fixated on the money. I was getting PAID to write! At first, this was enough to keep me on board despite the large workload.

But then I started to do the math.

I was getting paid $15 for an article of 1500 words. Assuming I didn’t have to do a lot of research on the subject, I could crank out an article in about two hours. Then, I’d spend another two hours editing my content to satisfy the precise word count requirements. Then another two hours inserting links to satisfy the company’s STRINGENT SEO requirements. In the end, each article would take at least 6 hours to complete.

Quick maths! What’s $15 divided by 6 hours?

15 / 6 = $2.5

That’s right: I was making $2.50 an hour for all my hard work, which doesn’t even COME CLOSE to minimum wage. Multiply the whole process by three and I was spending a minimum of 18 HOURS to make less than $50.

To add insult to injury, the company only paid out after an article was live for a month, which meant I didn’t see a dime for all my efforts until early February, and by then I had already called it quits.

Moral of the story? Well, for one, don’t ever write for content mills, and two, truly understand and prioritize how you spend your time.

I recommend using Clockify. It’s an app that allows you to keep track of how long it takes you to complete writing projects. Clockify is very helpful as a freelancing tool if you want an accurate measure of how to charge an hourly rate for your writing.

So to recap:

1. Understand Your Goals
2. Know Your Limit
3. Prioritize Your Time

Do you agree? Have you ever experienced burnout? What other advice can you share to avoid this debilitating mental state? Leave your answers in the comments below!