How I Stopped Blogger Burnout While Staying Productive

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During the summer I posted a blog titled, I Love blogging …Really I Do. If you haven’t had the chance to read it basically I was talking about my decision to cut back on my posting schedule and focus on other things.

This was probably the best thing I could have done for myself, my blog and my business. I was dealing with a lot in my personal life and really wanted to focus on creating and launching my course The Balanced Side Hustle, updating my free email course and just making sure I was doing my best and providing the best to my readers instead of pumping out 2 subpar posts a week just to be able to say I did.

I was a little nervous to hit “publish” on that post because I felt like I was bearing my soul and we all know the internet isn’t always kind. My words were met with so much love and support, I was so glad I wrote that post. I was even happier that I took the time to work on other content because, as I may have mentioned 1,000 times already, I am launching my course November 7th!

The Paradox of Choice

I was stuck in a rut for a while. I would sit down to write and just have no desire to get anything done. I would sit down and have so many ideas and so much to do I would do nothing. I’ve been sort of fascinated with The Paradox of Choice lately.

If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a theory from psychologist Barry Schwartz, that says, because we have so many choices as Americans we are actually more stressed out and overwhelmed. That we are more likely to fall into depression because the amount of choices can leave us paralyzed and unmotivated.

I realized this can happen in blogging and goal getting. There are so many things we want to do. We want to publish 3 blog posts a week, write for other websites, do consulting, start an online course, update our old Pinterest graphics, engage on social media, schedule a twitter chat and we look at all the list of ideas and tasks and don’t know where to start. You’re paralyzed by options and choices. So I sat back and made a choice, “I want to get this course launched by the end of the year.”

Okay sounds like another option to stress me out?

It would be, but I made a choice to pick that task and figure out what I needed to do to make it happen.

If I wanted to do a proper launch for this course and provide my best content then I need to:

Cut back on the amount of posts I’m doing
Outsource some of the more mundane tasks
Figure out whose information I would follow for which sections of the launch
Set times and deadlines for certain aspects of the launch.

Deciding that this was my main focus and the other things would take a back seat to this was game changing.

Breaking down that list of overwhelming desires for my business was like an “Ah Ha” moment.

My friend Ashley Jordan from Saving Money In Your Twenties always says, “You can have everything you want, but you can’t have everything,” while Ashley is talking about budgeting, this applies to life. You can have all the parts of your business but you can’t have them all at once.

Think of the larger scale, trying to add a podcast, videos and create a course all at once by yourself is insane.

Think of some of your favorite bloggers and business professionals. They didn’t appear online one day with social media accounts on each platform, doing videos, blog posts, podcasts, courses and offering consulting services all at once. They started at one point and slowly built on it.

It’s not stopping, it’s refocusing

I think the reason people never overcome overwhelm is because they think stepping back means stopping. No! It means stepping back looking at the big picture and then figuring out where you need to shift your focus for things to happen.

I didn’t say, “Oh I’m feeling burnt out, better pack it up.” I said, “I am spinning my wheels, something needs to change.”

I knew if I wanted to launch this course I would need to shift my focus on it and put other things on hold or scale them back.

I didn’t logout of WordPress for 3 months and say “Bye Felicia.” That isn’t a break, in my opinion, that’s quitting.

Getting Help Helps

Mariah Coz and Meghan Menz recently did a podcast about why people buy online courses. They didn’t say this but it sort of connected to The Paradox of Choice, people purchase courses, or services because there are so many ways to do everything that instead of picking through them all it’s nice to have someone say, here just take this path for certain things. It’s not about giving up control it’s about making the choice to pick a path, stop wasting time and getting to where you want to be.

I mean come on, I’m not launching a course about time management and life balance as a side hustler because there isn’t any content out there. I’m launching my course because I remember searching for answers on the matter and feeling more lost then I was when I started. Before I developed my system I was just spinning circles, trying to listen to all of this advice. Here is the thing with my program, it tells you how I figure out balancing my blog and this thing we call life and it helps you develop a system that works for you. We are all different, we have different priorities, different goals and different definitions of success so a blog post that says, “Do this and everything will be better,” isn’t exactly accurate. There is no one size fits all to life.

Webinar

I wanted to invite you all to my webinar, Actions From Distractions October 16th at 1:00 PM CST. If you can’t make the live webinar be sure to still sign up so you can view the webinar.

I will be addressing distractions and time management issues my readers have shared with me and giving a sneak peek into my course! Sign up here. I hope to see you there!

42 comments

candy

It’s not stopping it’s refocusing really hit home to me. Time to look at everything from a new angle.