You have been scrolling different websites for several hours to find something to boost inspiration. And it’s not the first time you realize that time goes by soooooo slowly.
Neither articles nor motivational quotes help you roll up your sleeves to start writing a good blog post.
Hold on a minute. Are you about to burn out?
Let’s check it:
- You procrastinate at work (Oops! It seems, you do!)
- Irritating mood
- You don’t have motivation
- Decreased working performance (how many articles have you written today?)
- You get negative feedback from your clients
- A lack of creative ideas (you’ve run out of good ideas)
If you are nodding right now, I have bad news for you then: you might be emotionally and physically exhausted.
Being a freelance blogger, you spend much time reading, writing, editing, seeking out new clients, communicating with customers, being in contact with your readers, and managing your time.
Obviously, being responsible for your work from A to Z is not an easy thing to do, and it can lead to a burnout.
First things first: what is a burnout for a freelancer?
The more you write, the more money you earn. Right?
As a rule, burning out can decrease your income, so it’s a crucial task for all freelancers to learn how to avoid it and start working without killing time.
If you want to keep writing, freelance blogging productivity is a key to success: manage your time and get more things done without losing work-life balance.
Here comes a list of pieces of advice:
Organize a Perfect Work Environment
Do you pay attention to the place where you work from?
Even if you’ve answered no or you have doubted for a while, it goes without saying that your workplace impacts your productivity. Therefore, you can write better articles without spending much time.
It looks promising. But…
If you work freelancing, it’s you who should think about making a positive working environment. And a workplace organization includes everything from picking out a comfortable chair to stinging motivational quotes on.
The process of creating a perfect work environment can be divided into three main parts:
Renovate your place
Your workplace should inspire you, so you’d better make some changes to fall in love with your office: paint the walls restful colors, get a comfortable chair, adjust proper lighting. All in all, do your best to create a good workplace.
Update gadgets
As a freelance blogger who writes a big amount of articles daily, you might use different gadgets (a laptop, a smart pen, a tablet, a smart phone). To increase your productivity, update your technologies to save time while working.
Form a habit
If you have a perfect work environment, that’s great. However, you need to form a habit to keep it always clean. Look: the fewer distractions you have, the more focused you are. It’s easy like 1, 2, 3.
Once you have a perfect work environment, it’s high time to develop personal skills not to burn out.
Learn Time Management Skills
“I wish I had more hands. Then I would have written more articles.”
Did you have this idea in your head? As for me, I did.
Unfortunately, there is no option to become a Hindu God with many hands, so we should find out alternative ways to get more things done.
And one of the ways is learning time management skills.
Surfing the Internet, you can come across a big variety of articles dedicated to the theme of honing time management skills.
And here are top 3 tips:
- Organize your comfortable schedule and stick to it. As a freelance worker, you can choose any time that works well for you, whether morning, evening or night.
- Use tools that help you. As the number of productivity tools is high, everyone can pick out the most efficient ones.
- Delegate tasks if you can. Freelance bloggers can cooperate with editors to ask them for revisions, editing/proofreading, or changing minor text chunks.
If you can manage your time, you can handle your workload easily, and you won’t be under pressure.
Set Goals
Have you ever dreamed about a publication on a good website? Do you plan to write more articles daily? Or what goals do you have in your head?
Every freelance blogger sets goals even if he doesn’t pay attention to this process. However, just a few bloggers write them down, and it’s better to start doing it. In fact, if you have written something, you remember about it for a longer time as your implicit memory works.
Moreover, visualization of your goals is the right way to stay focused on them. Thus, you’d better visualize your goals to boost inspiration. Don’t you know how to do it? Keep calm and read the following tips:
- Desire mapping. Hang pictures of what you’re going to achieve.
- Creative infographics. If you know how to craft infographics to visualize your goals, that’s great as it can become an important skill to illustrate your articles in the future.
- Dreaming. Close your eyes and imagine your goals. Do you like what you see? Great! Start working on achieving it.
Once you set goals, you’re ready to make efforts to achieve them. Compare your success to the previous results, and boost inspiration!
Track Your Achievements
It’s not enough to write down goals. You should put down your achievements as well if you want to track your results. A person who is burning out needs inspiration, and there is no better way to draw it as analyze your previous achievements: you can do it!
I know it, you know it, and your achievements just prove it!
So, once you’ve done something well, don’t be greedy to share it with your friends. For example, publish a post on your social media and get congratulations from your friends and colleagues.
Yes, you deserve it! People know it, and you know it. Pay yourself a compliment and treat yourself: do something you’ve been dreaming about for a long time, buy something, or simply take a day off.
Track your achievements to remember that you’re on the right track!
Hold On
If your writing muse has left you, and you can’t make up your thoughts, don’t tease yourself: hold on. There is no need to produce mediocre articles as haste makes waste. Thus, you’d better take a pause and draw inspiration from things you like.
No matter what you choose, whether a nice walk in the park, a day off to spend with friends, or start reading your favorite book, it’s important to enhance energy before coming back to your routine life.
Some of the ideas how to boost inspiration might be especially interesting for freelance bloggers, and we don’t plan to stash them:
- Learn something new. As the number of MOOCs is growing rapidly, every writer can find a course that suits his needs: to develop creative thinking, master writing skills, or learn how to create great emails for outreach. Thus, once you find something interesting, sign it up! Moreover, most courses are free of charge.
- Collaborate with gurus. Every blogger has a writing guru who inspires him. Even if you have just started your blogging career, don’t hesitate to contact your gurus. Every person would be glad to hear kind words, so you can just drop a line to this person. Plus, you can collaborate with them in the future: help with some articles, ask for feedback, or share their articles on your social media. Build your relations and prevent burning out!
A motivated person won’t face burnout as there is just no place for such things! Don’t be afraid of pauses – everyone needs them from time to time. We are not robots, and that’s wonderful!
Wrapping It Up
Every blogger has faced a burn out at least once, and it’s important to prevent it in order not to ruin your career!
After all, being a freelance blogger is great as you can organize a workflow that suits you, work wherever you want, manage your income, and much more! So, take a deep breath and cope with your burnout. Plus, we have motivational quotes for you. Check them out!
Here comes a list of tips from blogging gurus who succeed:
Jeff Goins, goinswriter.com
Sue Dunlevie, successfulblogging.com
Neil Patel, neilpatel.com
Kristi Hines, kristihines.com
Vishveshwar Jatain, adpushup.com
As you see, people can be about to burn out on their way to success, so do your best and start writing better pieces without sacrificing your well-being!
To get more paying gigs, learn how to impress your clients, and never burn yourself out!
Have you ever burnt out? What are your tricks on overcoming it?
Loved this post! Great ideas for burnout for bloggers.
Thanks for having me participate.
Sue
Sue, thanks for helping me!
Creating and a designated workspace and maintaining a workable routine are crucial to freelancing! Freelancers need to have structure, which includes time management and organization. Freelancing is a job—treat it like one!
Task management is also key. Freelancers who overload themselves create problems for both the freelancer and the client. Know yourself and workload before committing!
Chris, totally agree with you! Freelance job needs much effort!
Thanks for this article. Fairly new to this freelance world and am already seeing how these challenges could present themselves. Thanks for the advice!
Fantastic post!
I know I personally forget to treat freelancing like a “real job”. And burnout happens quickly because of my lack of goal setting!
Some of my personal tips for reducing/relieving burnout are practice self-care and close your browser tabs! I always have a million tabs open with full intentions of getting all of them done and closed by the end of the day. And when that doesn’t happen I always feel unmotivated and unproductive- never a good thing!