Burnout as a Digital Marketer: Causes, Symptoms, and Remedies
In digital marketing as in most industries, fear of decreased productivity causes us to over work. Yet no matter how hard we try we can only work so many longer hours before time soon runs out. Industry demands and increased responsibility and expectations of practitioners, has its share of causing pressure.
Other factors that cause burnout are
. Our unrealistic or perfectionist expectations
- Not being able to balance work and personal life
- Increased responsibility of digital marketing professionals and expectation by clients
- Increased and frequent changes in industry standards, resulting in new demands from practitioners
Symptoms
. Lack of interest in other activities
- Undue anxiety about the work
- Not being able to draw the line between overtime and normal work hours
Remedies
. Develop habits that discipline you e.g discouraging distractions from phone or unrelated tasks,
. Develop better schedule habits. This is where categorization of tasks into come into play.
Urgent - responding to deadlines received through emails
Immediate - (priority attn) - on social media and other communities where you need to interact with leads to avoid losing those contacts as some may be gone for a while
Action – to work on now or later
Important but not urgent - keeping abreast with updates; and useful interactions that can be done in free time
Later – not urgent nor requiring immediate action
• Continually seek for simpler ways of doing tasks like use of appropriate apps
• Free time should be observed as such
• Learn about adverse effect of your actions on others and avoid those habits e.g not allowing emotional outbursts that affect you or others
• Learn to say no
• Tasks which will interfere with your ability to handle existing work and maintain your well-being should not be encouraged
• Change your strategies if you are not getting expected results. Steps taken by
others to get their results may not be so obvious.
With time you’ll realize that some tasks, when not tackled immediately causes no harm as there’s no pressure at the receiving end.
Secondly, most of the tasks we do like checking emails, being on social media checking updates, giving comments and searching for leads complement each other. The same results can be achieved doing one but not the other so there is no need to be overly anxious to have all done by all means.
I hope you find some of these tips helpful along your internet marketing journey.
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Awhile back Jay touched upon many of the items you've talked about here. I like how Jay described scheduling things out so that you are not on any one thing too long.
He denoted the action of having tasks in their own "boxes." They are lined up on shelves and in your schedule, you take one down that you have planned and spend no more than an hour on it. After that, put that box up and take down another within your priority system. This might help with the anxiety and burn-out.
We do find ourselves burning out when we are trying to do something, like get an article out but then writer's block sets in. Remember when we were kids, our parents would make us eat everything on our plates? The trouble is, we didn't like it and it got even worse when it got cold. Still at the table, still the food sitting there keeping us there and we are going nowhere.
Might not be the best analogy but it works like this - sitting there trying to force yourself to get the thing written and you are just spinning wheels? Then it's time to put it up and then come back to it later after having done something different within the set of processes of the business.
If you have to force yourself, you are already losing productivity.
Good job on this! Thanks.
Many thanks Daniel. I like the idea of 'putting it up and coming back to it later after having done something different'; and really there are so many different things to do. Some of the tasks are like a pass time from which comes some relaxation.