Out of Office
EPISODE 9:
Time spent away from work can be just as important as time spent at work, so this week on the podcast Jenni and Wudan discuss their strategies for getting of the office and into the woods on a regular basis. Burnout is also a huge risk for freelancers, especially for writers telling stories about the human condition, and especially for those of us who struggle to turn work "off." Burnout is also bad for business, as it can decrease your efficiency and leave you feeling uninspired.
The episode starts with a discussion of how to avoid burn out, then moves to boundary setting, including setting office hours and determining a vacation benefits package for yourself. Veteran freelancer Alex Leviton also joined us to talk about how she combats burnout, including her own warning signs, her rulebook for avoiding burnout, and her belief that burnout can actually be a useful learning experience.
Alex Leviton is a longtime writer and editorial director, and the author of Explore Every Day, her 37th book project with Lonely Planet. She has a masters in journalism from UC Berkeley and in addition to writing, has been researching and teaching evidence-based tools for fostering creativity for over 15 years. She teaches her Second-Layer Creativity methodology to writers, physicians, CEOs, teens in a psychiatric hospital, and online at Write Like a Honey Badger.
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Full Transcript Below:
W- Welcome back to The Writer’s Co-op, a business podcast for freelance writers everywhere! We’re your co-hosts! I am Wudan Yan.
J- And I’m Jenni Gritters.
W- We are almost done with this season! It’s hard to believe it.
J- I know, so wild. Times flies.
W- Jenni, what are we talking about this week?
J- This week, we’re addressing getting out of the office. Taking vacations, spending half days in the woods or wherever else you go to decompress, and not working evenings or weekends (unless you want to, of course).
W- Wooo. This is a goodie. But before we get started, we have a plug. So many of our listeners ask us questions about the craft of writing, which, again, we’re devastated to say that we don’t address on this show. But for more craft talk, and interviews with some of the best in this business, y’all should listen to Longform Podcast. It’s hosted by Evan Ratliff, Max Linsky, and Aaron Lammer. They’ve recently had on Cheryl Strayed, photojournalist Phil Montgomery, and freelancer Eva Holland. There are lots of interesting conversations there about reporting, writing, interviewing, finding characters, and beyond.
J- They’re one of the first pods I started out listening to, when I became a freelancer! I always walk away from the episodes feeling inspired, so we definitely recommend checking them out.
W- Me as well. Recently, Lulu Miller was interviewed on the Longform Podcast, and she talked all about burnout, balancing work and life when you can’t turn your job “off,” and that existential “what am i doing!” doubt that often comes along with being a writer. That coincides really well with today’s topic.
J- So initially, we considered calling this episode “work life balance hacks.” But the phrase work life balance sometimes rubs me the wrong way because this effort to have a big life outside of my work is really an ebb and flow for me, and not always a perfect balance. Like, I’m never in the middle of the pendulum for more than a day. One week I’ll be great at making time for life outside of work, and the next week I might be terrible at it. It’s the big picture that matters to me.
W- You might be thinking: this is a business podcast! What’s avoiding burnout and taking time off got to do with running a business? Well, we’re here to say that finding ways to do less work allows you to be more productive on the days and moments that you are working. Stepping away from the work can give you more clarity on how you want to run your business. Yin and Yang.
J- I love talking about this. I’m a huge advocate for focusing on life beyond work. If I could choose one topic to evangelize for freelancers, it would be this! To start, I want to talk about why burnout can be such a problem for freelancers, and especially writers.
W- Agreed. As per usual, let’s start with story time! Jenni, tell me a story about a time when you were burnt out from work, and what you did about it.
J- This is sort of the story of my freelance career. In 2015, I was coming off of a media job where I was THAT person who everyone could go to with answers. I made myself indispensable, voluntarily took on the work of probably 2-3 people, and spent 10-12 hours per day working remotely on my laptop. It was my first media job and I wanted people to know that I was there to work. I wanted to be the last one they’d consider laying off. And so I worked. And I worked. And I worked. I went to yoga, but otherwise I just… worked. That’s what I did.
It paid off in that I got a promotion quickly, but the promotion made things even more complicated. I was managing people remotely, on both coasts, and basically online at all hours of the day. I was covering politics and progressivism during the 2016 election. Eventually, my body started to break down. My eyes would twitch, I developed chronic shoulder and back pain, my anxiety of sky high, and I couldn’t sleep.
After another year, I just straight up quit. No work plans ahead of me. That was the first time I tried freelancing. And honestly, it took me 3-4 months to come down off that burn out high. I couldn’t relax. I was always on my phone. And pretty much… everything about my life now is built to combat that type of situation from happening again.
W- Ugh, that is so hard. When you are greener and have a lot to prove -- it’s super easy to wear yourself out, fast! I’m glad you’ve learned from that.
J- Totally. Sometimes I have little moments where I feel that same way again, where I can feel the burnout approaching, and im like NO STOP. I can see it a mile away. Okay, Wudan, tell me about burn out for you. What’s your relationship to it? Have you had a bad burnout episode recently?
W- I was a sprinter when I was on the high school track team, if that tells you anything about my personality. I can basically only go hard for very short spurts of time.
I *did* have a really bad burnout bout starting in mid-March, for about an entire month. Mid-March was when an international trip I had planned was cancelled because of coronavirus --
J- -- we are still recording during pandemic times ---
W- -- and I had to basically make up for a lot of lost income. So I panic-hustled. I got lots of assignments, super fast. And the more assignments I said yes to, the more seemed to come my way. I took them all! I didn’t even have time to manage my master spreadsheet and see how much work I was taking on so I didn’t have a good sense of when to stop. I think I knew two weeks in that I was burning out, but still had like … two weeks of deadlines left. And the last two weeks were super hard.
So… my relationship to burnout is that it comes and goes. I’d say I’m incredibly self aware of when it creeps in. I’m less excited to get to work. Writing feels like a drag. I feel bored of the process. All this is pretty unusual for me. Before corona, I felt like I had a pretty good handle on avoiding burnout because i was in a flow with larger projects, but with corona, I’m balancing many more shorter term assignments. It’s a learning process!!
J- I think burnout is a huge issue for most writers and journalists, but especially for freelancers. For many of us, our work is on our laptops, and on our phones. It’s always available. We’re often working from home so we dont get to leave work behind. Without strict boundaries, work is just… always there. You never get to turn off. You don’t have mandated vacation. It can get bad.
W- Agreed. I think burnout is maybe one of the most under-discussed but most important issues freelance writers can face. Because if we burnout too hard, we can’t work. And we have to work if we want to make money.
J- We wanted to bring in someone else to chat with us this week about burnout, and Alex Leviton seemed like the perfect fit. Alex has worked as a journalist, editorial director, start-up co-founder, and travel writer. She teaches writing classes, just published a book about how to access your creativity, and she’s been doing all of this work for several decades in the midst of major moves, traveling the world, and personal crises. Here’s my conversation with her:
Alex, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us.
Alex Leviton- Thank you for having me.
J- As you know, today we are talking about burnout. And as someone with a long history of working as a writer and a freelancer and an editor, I would love to hear about your relationship with career burnout.
A- I had a pretty big burnout session, I think it was about 2009. I was working 8 different freelance gigs at one time. One of them was part-time in an office. I was renting out my place 3000 miles away so I was a landlord. It was a pretty tough time. So I went through burnout, which was probably the best thing that ever happened to me in my light.
J- Hmm, tell me why it was good.
A- I’m sure that’s a question that I’ll get a lot. And you know a little bit about the methodology that I teach, but very quickly, I put a lot of things when I teach creativity on this spectrum that goes from 10 to -10. I call anything below 0 “triage.” That’s when you’re underwater and struggling. I think burnout is so different for everybody. If you’ve got babies at home or you’re working 8 jobs, then you might be starting at a -5. So any”advice” I give has to be taken with a grain of salt of where you are on that scale yourself. But I was working so much and I was doing several volunteer gigs on top of this and a lot of difficult things in my life and I got a health issue. I was doing a Lonely Planet book and at one point I was so physically exhausted. On the road, I was in Italian hill cities and I was going up and down the road carrying really heavy things, and I am not a large woman. And it was just so physically difficult I sat down and started crying. I physically could not move. And then I ended up dealing with some health issues and getting a diagnosis and I was lucky enough to get a 3-month leave of absence because of the diagnosis. That was the most amazing time. As a freelancer, you don’t want to drop out of your career. So much of it is momentum. I think I worked an average of 360 to 363 days a year for about ten years. So to know that I got to that point where I was a -9, it was not a good thing. I had to stop for three months.
J- Yeah, let’s talk about that freelancer part because I think that in addressing burnout, this is an issue that is a big problem for freelancers, maybe especially freelance writers. Do you have any thoughts on why this is a particular issue? You mentioned that we feel like we don’t want to start working. We don’t want to press pause because it’s all about momentum… But what else? Are there other reasons that this particular group may be prone to burnout?
A- Absolutely. I think part of it for writers, storytellers, poets, journalists, anybody that wants to look at the human condition and report back on the human condition to other people, we really need to feel ourselves the full range of the human condition. You know, we’re researching… Jon Stewart talked about this when he quit The Daily Show. As storytellers, we need to research the full range of the human condition, and we need to look at the absolute worst of society. Especially for people who are fiction writers and poets and freelance writers and journalists, either we’re experiencing it ourselves through emotions or we’re seeing it in society and reporting back on it. And that’s part of our job. On that scale, if we lived in a 2-4, who would want to read an article, or who would want to read a poem from somebody who never went above a 4 or never went below a 2? To be able to be storytellers and writers, we need to have a full range of human experience.
J- That makes a lot of sense. These episodes live forever, but I think this is a particularly interesting time to be talking about burnout as a writer or journalist with the state of the world. Do you have any thoughts on this particular moment and why being plugged into the human condition can be a recipe for burnout?
A- I think what we’re witnessing now is 400 years of pain and 100 years since the last pandemic and all of this is on top of a presidency that’s already quite rife with this amazing amount of strife and all of this is on top of.. .I think about 30/40 years of, we almost have this addiction to stress right now. So we’re piling this all one on top of the other on top of the other. Especially for people within communities of color that have been going through this for hundreds of years, we’re at this reckoning. This enormous reckoning. And writers are on the front lines of this. You saw here in Seattle, and I think in several cities, several journalists have lost their eyes. And this is a time of reckoning. The changes that are going to come out of this are amazing, but I think we also do need to take care of ourselves to be able to be there and witness that -9 through 9 world. We need to be able to take care of ourselves.
J- I think you’re absolutely right. Tell me about your tactics for preventing burnout or taking care of yourself that you’ve developed over the years so that you don’t find yourself sitting on a path in Italy totally with nothing left to give.
A- I think I had to get to my -9 to be able to do this, and those three months were, in a way, three of the best months of my life. It was a medical leave of absence so it was a privilege to know that I had a little bit of money coming in and to know that I was going to be able to go back to a job. I think that’s what’s so hard for freelancers. I never could take that time. For 12 straight years I never could take that time because I knew I needed to stay on that path. And there weren't all these tips during that time. So what I hope I can do for people who don’t have those three months is take my experience and give them those tips.
Don’t ever try to give yourself tips while you’re in burnout. Take time, even if it’s now, take one day off and write in your journal and come up with checklists, rules, what has made you not have burnout in the past? What’s ever helped you? When you’ve gotten to your -3, -5, -9 place, what were some of the things that told you you were going to go there? What were the things you could look for next? Put 10 pages aside in a journal or notebook and write as many lists as you can. One list: how do you know you’re going down? Another list: what’s helped you when you were there? Another list; What helps you stay at the +5s, +7s, +9s. What are the things that help you get up there?
J- That makes a lot of sense. Tell me about, for you, what some of those prevention or assistance tactics are. If you see burnout coming, what do you do now?
A- I absolutely love being a -1/-2 because I get som much good stuff. It’s when I get to -3 that I really have to stop myself. So what I’ve done is I’ve written list after list after list that helps me realize when I’m getting to that point. So I’ll know when I get overwhelmed, when I get irritable, that’s when I need to stop. I love getting a little angry. I love feeling a little pressure because that helps me bounce up. But it’s when that pressure goes too far. So it’s a really fine line, and I’ve written lists on how can tell that fine line. So wanting to back away. I used to be a huge raging introvert and I’m much more introverted now. That helps me tremendously. That came out of that 3 months of burnout.
J- What else do you do if you see yourself approaching that -3? Do you take on less work? Do you take days off? What does that look like?
A- You said this before to me — it’s just noticing. The biggest thing I can do is just notice when I’ve gotten to that -3, and then my brain will start kicking in. This is why I got to burnout, because I didn’t realize all these things were happening. I had that stress addiction. “You worked 60 hours last week? I worked 80.” “I worked a 30-hour day.” “I worked a 34-hour day.” Our society kind of got addicted to stress and I absolutely was in there as much as anybody else. And so the biggest thing I could do isn’t even a thing, It’s a one-second thought.
J- That makes a lot of sense to me. It’s seeing before you get too far. Do you have any rules for yourself in terms of not working 36 hours a day? Do you have any boundaries that you’ve set around your schedule or your career that help you avoid pushing too far or getting addicted to stress in that way?
A- You probably didn’t mean this literally, but I literally have rules. I have them written down and I have maybe 18 different rules.
J- Yeah, I actually did mean rules, because I have them too and I love to hear about them. So tell me.
A- When I get a freelance assignment, my brain wants to just kind of spiral down and say “oh god, this is going to be so much.” So I have about 6 rules that are between statements and rules. But one of them is: When I get an assignment, I will feel overwhelmed. So one of my rules is I will feel overwhelmed, great, and I’ll just give myself a half-hour or hour to feel like ”Oh my god I’m never going to be able to do this.” Go research first. Before I even think about how overwhelming this will be, go research. Write a list: what do I need to do? Write an outline. And then sleep on it for a day. I know that I’ll do that spiral and go down to the -3s and -4s so I’ll check in with myself: yes, I’m going to feel overwhelmed, yes I’m going to feel pressure. Okay. And Jill Bolte Taylor, who wrote My Stroke of Insight, she’s got a TED Talk about it as well, she talks about how you’ve got 90 seconds where your body can’t stop feeling a negative emotion. So I’ll give myself that — it’s at least 90 seconds but it’s usually a little more than that. And I’ll say “okay, great.” And I can almost watch myself from the outside say “there’s my emotion going from stress to pressure. Great! Love it. Okay, once I’m over it then I’ll go onto the next step.”
J- I love this. It’s all kind of emotional processing and identification. I’m a trained yoga instructor so these are things you learn in yoga but I use them so much in my freelance career too. I think the ability to see emotions as passing clouds is really helpful. Last question for you: what would you say to the burnout self, however many years ago, sitting on that path? What would you say to her that you know now?
A- Good question. “You needed this. You needed to get to your -9 to know that you never had to go below a -3 or -4. I’ll still dip down there once in a while, but unfortunately the way that society almost idolizes stress, it is literally a physical addiction to stress. We get dopamine hits. And we get these rushes of adrenaline from stress. So I think I absolutely had that and I think all of society does. It’s strange. If we don’t have that, people think “What’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you doing 5000 things?” So I would say “I think you needed this, and know that feeling. Know what the feeling feels like to be a -9 so that you don’t have to go back there and so that you can understand and teach other people what their -9s might feel like. All of our -9s are going to be different.”
J- I love it. OK Alex, thanks so much for your time. We’ll talk to you later.
A- Thank you so much. Good luck.
J- Talking to Alex really made me think about how the emotional work of writing for an audience can be exhausting. You’re on a stage, you’re getting feedback from all sides, and you’re still required to work in the midst of crises-- in fact, you’re often the one processing these crises for other people to understand.
Just last year, the World Health Organization decided to include burnout in its list of occupational phenomena. They say it includes feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, mentally distancing yourself from your job, feeling negative about your job, and reduced efficiency. And when I read that definition I’m like YEP YEP and YEP. That’s 100% freelancing on a bad day or during a too-busy time, and definitely journalism defined.
W- Oooof. I feel that so hard right now. WIth the pandemic, the protests, and so so so much more.
J- Let’s talk about solutions to this. Alex had some great ideas but Wudan, tell me what you do to combat burnout.
W- I make it a rule to take a walk outside without my phone for an hour every day. That’s about as much time as I spend walking my dog, and… she’s a handful! So I enjoy being out with her, paying attention to her, the squirrels. I’ll offer that as my easiest, cheapest go-to anti-burnout strategy. I honestly think what I’m burned out from is not the work itself, but having to be “on” all the time. Anything that gives me a break from my phone is great.
What about you, Jenni?
J- I agree that for me, the most effective burnout avoidance strategies are daily small things. I have this note on my bulletin board by my desk that says: I don’t work evenings or weekends. I don’t eat lunch at my desk. I get up to move each hour. I’m not the person who knows and does everything.
I’m not always effective at executing on those rules, but I try every day. And I really do try to keep my hours set, too. Speaking of, I think this is the first step for all of us, actually, is thinking about how you want your week to look and maybe setting actual in-office hours.
W- Yeah, I’ve even seen people put this in their email signature.
J- Totally. Do you have set work hours, Wudan?
W- Vaguely, yes. I used to work 7:30 am - 3:30pm, with a long break in between, and working out after that. Now it’s more like 8am-4pm, with some exceptions. What about you?
J- My hours are Monday through Thursday, 10-4 PST. I do some work outside of those hours, but that’s when I’m available to my clients and my editors for calls and emails. That’s when I have childcare coverage and can reliably promise to get my brain in gear. Outside of that, I’m not available to people. I tell clients those hours CONSTANTLY. When I send in an assignment, I say: for edits, this is when I’m available. If I remind them a lot, they’re pretty respectful.
Here’s another big issue: vacation. Americans are notoriously bad at taking vacation, and I think freelancers are even worse. Do you take set vacations Wudan? And how much do you usually take?
W- My lofty goal last year was something stupid insane like 52 vacation days -- one per week of the year. I think I got to 40. My partner and I usually go on vacation for two weeks or so, and then I’ve taken lots of random weekdays off. Buuuut I don’t know when my vacation will be at this moment because what are plans???
J- Did you go anywhere cool during those vacation weeks last year?
W- I snuck one last vacation in before coronavirus really started screwing up travel plans, and that was to Grand Staircase in Utah. Last year, after a month long project in Myanmar, I took about a week off in Thailand. Saw friends, sprawled out on a beach, went diving. It was really necessary after an intense month of being on assignment.
What about you, Jenni? Do you have a vacation policy?
J- Yeah, this year is a little different because COVID, and because I just took 3 whole months off for maternity leave, but during the first two years of my biz I took one week off every quarter. I have an out of office responder set for those weeks off that says: Hi, I’m out of office right now. I typically take one week off per quarter to realign with my business priorities. This is that week. I’ll plan to get back to you by X date at the latest. Thanks for understanding!
I thought people would be pissed, but I do a lot of extra work to communicate my schedule to my clients-- again, being like hey, if you need me to get edits in before i go, send them now. I remind them like 4x, and then it’s not my problem if they didn’t get it to me in time! And it turns out that my clients think it’s kinda cool that I take time off. Like, they’re jealous.
W- Yes. When I used to have dates blocked off for when I’m traveling and on assignment, I would tell my editors my blackout dates.
Jenni, tell me about the best vacation you took as a freelancer!
J- So about 6 months after I started my business, I saw a groupon for a severely discounted hotel stay in Bermuda. I talked to my husband and was like - wow, after an entire career of having to ask for vacation time, I can just take time off! We went for a week and had an absolute blast. I turned off my phone and didn’t take my laptop. I’d been working really, really hard to launch my business, so I have this memory of sitting on our deck and thinking oh my god, i can finally take a deep breath. The constant, driving pace of freelancing rarely allows for that. It was dreamy. We also did a week-long trip in a camper van along the oregon coast and man, that was one for the books. Daily hiking, no internet connection. It was fantastic.
Wudan, talk to me about taking vacation as a business strategy. I get a lot of people saying to me “I can’t take time off if I want to hit my financial goals!” Do you see time traveling, or time on vacation, as a money sink for your business?
W- First of all, with any other job, you get vacation days. So it makes sense as a freelancer to build that in yourself. Of course, it’s not going to be a paid vacation, but my business plan accounts for that. Sometimes in one month I’ll make way over what I need to make for a month, so I can relax for a bit the following month. Or I expect money to come in while I’m on vacation. I’m usually trying to make more money before vacation, always, so I won’t be as stressed, and won’t think of vacation as a money sink.
J- Agreed, I also usually come back from a vacation refreshed, and then I’m more efficient. Like that trip to Bermuda, I came back with so much energy! I’ve found that when I just sit in the grind for week after week, I become LESS efficient overall which actually tracks with the WHO’s definition of burnout.
I always think about how at my first media job, we had unlimited vacation. And no one took vacation because no one was telling you to take vacation! That’s how it feels to be a freelancer too-- like, no one is going to tell you to do it, so you have to plan it for yourself. And you also have to hold yourself accountable to actually TAKE the vacation time.
We’re going to include a few things in the learning portal this week: The first is a short worksheet to help you think through your vacation goals and weekly work hours, and a template for setting an out of office responder. What’s your business’s vacation policy?
W: In the end, this comes back to boundary setting. Figure out what you need, and then say it out loud.
J- Agreed. I also really cant undersell the value of taking random days off midweek to go hiking.
W: Same! Lately, I’ve been taking random afternoons off, telling nobody, and just throwing up my away message, haha. The trails are less empty, it’s good thinking time to just breathe, get in the zone, whatever. Also, everyone is always jealous of my mid-day hikes, and I’m like, you can have this too! Come up with a business plan, come up with a schedule, be militantly diligent about managing your time, set boundaries, and it will happen.
J- Honestly, every time I’m out there mid-week, I feel like I’m getting away with something. It’s like the 100% BEST way to remind myself that I have so much more freedom than I’d have if I worked a desk job.
I think this comes back to values too, which is what we discussed during the very first episode of season one and also keep mentioning throughout the season. What do you care about? If you can do activities that align with what you care about, you’re going to be so much happier. For me, that’s movement (exercising, yoga, running) and getting outside. When I do those things, my anxiety calms and I’m able to focus on the work at hand even better.
I want to circle back to burn out here a bit, though, and come back to the true value of taking a vacation or a day off. Wudan, how does taking time away specifically help your burn out?
W: I’m probably running into the woods when I’m especially burned out. It’s like, I need to escape from the horror that is my computer. It’s just my natural instinct and it reduces my stress.
J- Yeah, I’ve seen research about time outdoors slowing your brain down and sparking creativity. But I think I’ve found, overtime, that going hiking is one of my burnout medications. It’s my anti drug, haha. And I actually read a study last week about how vacation time actually measurably improves productivity, which means, and im going to say this loudly: IF YOU ARE TAKING A VACATION, YOU ARE PROBABLY MAKING A GOOD BUSINESS DECISION. You are making your business more efficient, and increasing your own capacity for work.
W- I think the hardest part of this, though, is saying no to an assignment and saying yes to taking time off.
J- Yes, 100% agreed. We talked about saying no last episode, and I have some tell tale signs where I’m like okay, it’s time to step away from work. I need to say no to an assignment and take care of myself.
Early on, I set myself an upper limit on the amount of work I could bring in so that I could actually take vacation. Because at first, I was just like I WANT TO MAKE THE MOST and I just kept taking on more and more work. This is my personality for sure, like I just want to do everything and I have trouble turning my brain off. I needed a metric to tell myself: You’re done. You’ve done enough. You can take a break. Now I know that if I hit a certain amount of income every month, I’m done. I’ve hit the roof. I need to pause. I can also usually tell that if I have more than 10 projects going on at any one time, I’ve also hit the roof. Time to plan for a pause.
But giving yourself permission to pause is hard!
W- So hard.
J- Wudan, I’m curious, do you plan vacations in advance and put them on the calendar, or do you take them when you see time opening up between assignments a few weeks ahead?
W: My partner and I usually have to deliberate pretty hard on vacation, so that will just get blocked out and then I treat it as blackout dates in my calendar. For those random mid-day hikes, I’m usually looking at my work matrix for an upcoming week
J- A copy of that is in the portal if you’re a member, BTW
W- and if I have a day that looks super light I am just going to shuttle things around, work more on other days, and take a full day off.
What about you?
J- I plan mine in advance, usually, otherwise I think I’m less likely to take them. My husband will take the time off from his job officially, and I’ll put it in our google cal. It holds me accountable to actually leaving work behind. I like that you call them blackout dates.
Here’s another one I struggle with: How do you prevent yourself from working when you’re on vacation?
W- Really realy really really really simple answer: I don’t bring my work laptop. Yes, I am checking my email every morning and evening, but otherwise, I’m just enjoying my time. I’ll send brief emails back on anything that requires attention. But everything else I will just flag and once I’m back from vacation I will respond to everyone. Yes, this system REALLY works and I hardly miss emails. What about you, Jenni?
J- I literally take my email app off my phone, lol, and i also leave my computer behind. I do find that it takes me a day or two to slow my brain down enough that I’m not constantly scrolling and checking things. Offline time IS great though. I think my work is MUCH improved when i leave my technology behind. I get so many creative ideas!
W- What we really want to communicate in this episode is that burnout is a real symptom of working as a freelancer, especially in media. And one of the best ways to combat it is to get out of your normal routine, take a vacation, or press the pause button on work.
J- We know it can be tough to actually take time off. It can feel like you’re constantly working, when you’re a freelancer. So some of our tried and true methods for actually implementing this are: putting vacations on the calendar as blackout dates, setting vacation goals for how much you want to take each year, over-communicating with editors about upcoming time off, and setting an OOO message while you’re gone.
W- It can also be useful to set actual working hours for the week. Whatever works for you is best for you, but knowing your boundaries is key here.
J:-And we want to say that this is an ever-moving target. I rarely hit the perfect balance between my work and my life.
W- Same. Some weeks I’m working like crazy, some weeks things are slower.
J- It’s rarely perfect. But taking care of yourself matters, and taking time away from work-- just like people in full time jobs do-- is really important.
W- Be a good manager to yourself!
J- Yes. What’s your benefits package for your business? I hope it’s damn good.
W- Alright, it’s that time again where we announce that we’re heading back to work. We’re about done with season 1 of the pod, with just one episode left about longterm career planning.
J- I’m excited about that one! We’re also planning a special episode only for our co-op members, which will get into our secret sauce. If you’re a $3/ month member or you’re signed up for any of our other membership levels, you’ll get that episode in mid-July. Then we’ll take a break and start building season 2.
W- If you want to collaborate with us, or if you have things you’d like to hear about for season 2, please reach out. We love to hear from you! x
J- We really do.
W- Tell us your wins, Or how you got something from this podcast and implemented in your business -- and how it went.
J- Okay, I’ll see you later Wudan!
W- Bye Jenni!
