It is tough being an up-and-coming digital marketer in the midst of a quickly changing landscape. With high expectations and demands, it’s not uncommon for employees to feel burnt out with their work.
What Is a Burnout?
Burnout is generally characterized by emotional, physical, social, and mental exhaustion that’s brought on by work stress and lack of time to recharge. It can happen for various reasons – a long workload with looming deadlines, endless meetings, or just have too many responsibilities in general.
Usually, someone would start experiencing symptoms of burnout after being stressed out from work over an extended period of time. This includes feeling hopeless about the job you’re doing, feeling unmotivated for your day-to-day tasks at work (despite knowing it won’t have a good impact on your career), not caring much about anything anymore, and even dealing with depression caused by the situation.
How can you avoid burnout?
As someone in digital marketing, there are many ways to avoid burnout. Despite the growing demand for skilled workers with excellence in digital marketing skills, being overwhelmed isn’t always a given.
Here are some tips on how you can handle stress using an effective approach:
1. Set Goals
Even if you don’t have any large projects to work on, it might be worth setting small goals for yourself. This helps provide structure and focus even when things slow down. Identify which tasks need to be completed today and what efforts will help you reach your ultimate career goal of having a fruitful and satisfying job by the end of the year.
Set Short-Term (and achievable) Goals – There have definitely been times when I’ve talked about looking back at projects and wonder how I was able to manage it all.
The answer: they were very short-term, and most tasks had a clear-cut due date.
In fact, breaking down even the largest project into small segments can be much more manageable if you start with smaller chunks like half of a documentary or bunching together similar documents for certain categories.
2. Plan Your Day
When someone tells me that they aren’t good at managing their time, my immediate response is, “Yes, You Are!” The truth is, you are probably just bad at planning your day. And that’s okay because it’s something that can be improved upon with practice.
A great way to start is by making a list of all the things you want to accomplish for the day (or week, depending on how much time you have). Prioritize based on what needs to get done first and then block out enough time in your schedule so you can achieve everything. Instead of working on one thing at a time, try switching between different tasks throughout the day.
This way, if something gets held up or goes wrong, you aren’t completely stuck waiting for another task to finish up before moving onto the next thing. This is a great way to break up the monotony of working on one task for hours at a time.
3. Delegate duties
Not only is delegation a great opportunity to trust your team and spread out the workload, but it’s also vital for preventing burnout. As a manager or leader of any type, you are in charge of overseeing what needs to be done and holding everyone accountable.
Even if you’re not in an official management position with another person under you, there’ll come a time where you have more duties than you can handle on your own. Take some time off from doing tasks and focus on delegating some jobs to others instead.
4. Automate your marketing tasks
These days, there are a ton of tools to automate marketing tasks. Paying attention to what you can outsource and then looking for a tool or solutions that could help automate it will do wonders for your stress levels.
According to Zale Mortgage, one of the best mortgage marketing companies, a reputable agency will take the weight of your marketing campaigns off your shoulders so you can focus on what’s really important: running a successful business. The best part about this is that by trusting them to help improve visibility, conversions, and sales you can focus on the one thing that matters most: yourself!
5. Make Time for Yourself
It might not always be possible to take a break from work when things get busy, which is why it’s important to schedule time in advance where you can do some fun activities that rejuvenate your mind!
Getting out of the house or office once in a while reminds you why you are passionate about your job and leaves room for positive self-reflection. It will also make coming back into the workplace more exciting.