deepstash
Beta
5 Powerful Ways to Bounce Back from Creative Burnout -RescueTime Blog
Understand your limitations
Burnout occurs when job demands consistently outweigh the resources available. The first thing you need to do is to set proper limits.
When you limit your time spent on specific tasks, you give yourself permission to make choices. Instead of fighting perfectionism for example, you learn to stop when things are good enough.
355 SAVES
This is a professional note extracted from an online article.
Read more efficiently
Save what inspires you
Remember anything
IDEA EXTRACTED FROM:
5
Key Ideas
Understand your limitations
Burnout occurs when job demands consistently outweigh the resources available. The first thing you need to do is to set proper limits.
When you limit your time spent on specific tasks, you give yourself permission to make choices. Instead of fighting perfectionism for example, you learn to stop when things are good enough.
Learn to say no
... especially to projects and clients that suck the creativity out of you.
When your mental resources are limited, you need to make sure they’re going to the right tasks. Burnout decimates your motivation, making working on projects you’re uninterested in an agonizing process.
Finding a creative outlet
Find a completely unrelated creative outlet: look for a creative task with lower stakes to help ease you back into things and re-ignite your creativity and motivation.
What are the things in your own life that you enjoy but aren’t necessarily “productive”?
Self-care and creative fuel
How you give yourself self-care is up to you.
It could mean going to bed an hour earlier. Making time for a walk in nature. Going to an art show. Or even just doing something fun.
Strict, yet realistic deadlines
For example, if you need to write a chapter of a book, instead of sitting down and looking at a black page for hours on end, break it up into tiny increments and set tight deadlines (such as 250 words every 20 minutes).
Not only will you not have time to become self-critical, but once you start working it’s much easier to keep going.
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
7
Key Ideas
The Relationship Between Goals And Burning Out
Effective goal-setting underlies the fundamental aspect of your motivation and keeps stressful situations at bay.
If you don’t set goals in positive, attainable ways, you may fall i...
Reorganizing Your Goal Hierarchy
As losing resources is more likely to cause burnout than gaining resources is to mitigate it, dealing with the negative aspects is more beneficial than using positive “band-aid” fixes. You want to drive down uncertainty and inefficiency to ensure that you aren’t doing unnecessary tasks and minimize your emotional exhaustion. To do that:
- Create a chart and place your major goal at its top, followed by layers of very specific subgoals needed to attain the major goal.
- Find and fix the inefficiencies in your goal hierarchy.
- Determine the attainability of each goal.
Burnout Symptoms And Signs Of Exhaustion
- Chronic fatigue
- Insomnia
- Impaired concentration/ forgetfulness
- Loss of appetite
- Anxiety
- Increased illness
- Physical symptoms
- Chest pain
- Shortness of breath
- Dizziness
- Gastrointestinal pain
- Depression
- Interpersonal problems.
4 more ideas
6
Key Ideas
We're not born creative
Some of us are better at making new connections between concepts. But this is in most cases the result of hard, deliberate work, not an accident of birth.
Walking and creativity
- Walking helps you to get away from your daily sources of stress, thus reducing anxiety in the short term.
- Walking improves the process of creating new analogies in your brain.
Keep your hands busy
Doing something intricate with your hands – a Rubik’s Cube, squeezing a ball, fiddling with dice – excites various parts of your brain and might actively change the way you are thinking.
3 more ideas
2
Key Ideas
Creativity expectations
Our expectations of how creativity should look like block us. Creative inspiration is all around us, but we don’t see it because we've grown up being taught to look for it in specific p...
How to feel more creative
- Take a break. Give your brain some space to think of other things.
- Expand your definition of creativity. You’re probably conditioned to look for it in specific places. Break that mold.
- Limit yourself. Fewer tools and less time, counterintuitively, force you to be more creative.