Career Growth and Preventing Burnout

This past weekend was very productive. As the last few weekends have been for me. I set some business goals for myself at the beginning of the year, and have been working diligently to accomplish them. I am so excited to announce that I have exceeded my income goal for this month already, and there are still a few days left in the month.

This is very motivating to me, as it shows that my efforts have really been paying off. But after spending about 8 hours straight in front of my laptop at home on Sunday, I realize I need a bit of organization in my working at home life. I worked remote for a few jobs I’ve had in my life, for several years actually. Working at home can be a blessing but if not done correctly it can definitely feel you LIVE AT WORK instead of WORK AT HOME.

It’s been a while since I’ve worked at home, and I feel like I’ve lost my mojo. After my super exhausting day on Sunday, I need to get it back while my business is growing rather than later. My problem is that it’s very hard for me to do a little bit of work at once. I don’t feel like I am being productive. As far as a website is concerned, it is easier for me to just hash out a site all at once. Or at least get a nice chunk of it done in one shot. But when I don’t have any design work to complete, I think I spend too much time working on my business. Not that it’s a bad thing to do. But I don’t want to get burned out before I really begin to take off. And a lot of days I feel absolute exhaustion when it comes to my website. (Right now I am working on creating new content, as well as article marketing for my graphic design blog/portfolio.)

I’m going to implement some ground rules for myself. And of course these rules can be modified and adjusted as I see fit, but I at least need to set some guidelines for myself.

Here’s the list I’ve come up with so far to help me prevent career burnout:

1. Take two days off per week. My 9-5 gives me 2 days off per week, so I need to give myself two days off as well to get my mind clear and prevent designer’s block. These two days should be different from my job, or at least 1 of the days should be.
2. Take long breaks from work every few hours.
3. Like with any other job, if I can’t finish something in a reasonable amount of time in the same day, set it aside for the next day. I’m usually ahead of schedule on deadlines if I have one, so not trying to rush and leaving work for the next day in order not to exhaust myself shouldn’t be an issue.
4. Take business emails off my phone, or set to manual update… I like to check my email frequently, however I suppose if something is urgent the person would contact me via phone. Ideally I’d like to go through these emails maybe twice a day. That way I’m not distracted by promo emails when I could be doing something else.
5. Set up some business hours on my website so potential clients will know when to expect a reply back from me.

I think I’ve pretty much covered everything that takes away from productivity and causes exhaustion and work burnout for me. Hopefully by implementing these guidelines I’ll be able to see a lot of growth in my design business without wearing myself out in the process.