4 Tips For Writers Who Want To Avoid Creative Burnout And Get More Done

The feeling of creative burnout is when you've worked so hard to establish a writing habit, tried to do more writing, or thought that hard work would solve all your problems.

I'm here to tell you that hard work might be causing you more trouble than it's actually helping you. I've dealt with creative burnout multiple times. And it's stopped me from doing what I wanted to do in the first place, and what I worked on becoming better at:

Writing.

In this week's issue of the newsletter, I'm going to give you 4 tips that helped me get out of creative burnout that might help you do the same.

1. Focus on essential actions

The first tip is to cut down on the tasks you set for yourself by focusing on those that are most important to you.

What I would recommend you do is to create a list of all the tasks that make up your writing routine.

It could be research, outlining, writing a chapter, finishing a section, or editing. Get as specific with each point of all the tasks that you set for yourself, and then ask yourself: Is it realistic for me to finish all these tasks in the timeframe I've given myself? If not, figure out which tasks are most essential to you to get done right now.

And do the essential tasks first.

2. Don't do everything at once

By doing everything at once, you're not really committing your focus to anything.

Instead, focus on one task at a time and keep going until you've finished or completed the amount of work you decided was necessary for the work session. And then move on to the next task. And do the same there.

By doing it this way, you'll actually finish the tasks on your list, and you'll get the reward of being able to cross items off and watch your progress.

3. Find the reasons for past burnouts

Try to look back at times in your life, when you felt forced to take a step back because of burning out.

This has happened to me on several occasions, some of which I've specified here:

I recently did this exercise myself, and looked back at these earlier pursuits to see what went wrong. The answer was obvious, but yet I had not learned from it before I actually became aware of it. The answer was that I went into all of the pursuits too hard to fast.

Therefore the answer for me was to pace myself to play an infinite game.

4. Design your habits to play an infinite game

The idea of an infinite game was something I had never thought about before, but when I heard of it the first time it made complete sense to me.

You need not focus on habits for ultimate growth if those habits are not sustainable for you in the long term. Instead, look at where you want to go and design your habits to get there in a way that's sustainable for you to do every day until you get there. This way you're productive in the long term and not only short term.

Hopefully, this will also prevent you from burning out and not reaching your goals.

Weekly Resource

This video of Simon Sinek will explain to you the concept of the infinite game.

Weekly Highlight

This week I crossed 200 followers on X and celebrated this in the following post:

Free Resources

• My Ultimate Guide for Building an Email Newsletter

• The Content Creation List (Template)

• The Newsletter Template

• Medium Article (Template)

Until Next Time...

The answer is not to quit.

It's to be mindful of your actions.