Creator Burnout Is Killing Businesses Here’s How to Survive

In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett shares the growth of creator burnout poses a danger to the prosperity of companies that rely on human ingenuity. Content development, editing, uploading, marketing, analytics, audience interaction, and customer service are all tasks that many producers attempt to manage on their own, which results in mental and physical strain.

In addition to decreasing productivity, creativity, and consistency, this unrelenting pace can eventually cause artists to lose touch with the love that first motivated their work. Not only does burnout damage the individual, but it also negatively impacts the company, resulting in decreased quality, lost opportunities, and slower growth. In order to thrive, artists must create sustainable processes that prioritize high-impact work, assign or automate repetitive activities, and produce material in batches rather than continuously.

To preserve energy and mental health, it’s critical to set boundaries between work and personal life. Take deliberate pauses, and practice self-care. Reestablishing a connection with the original intent of the work and reframing success in terms of sustainability and quality helps artists stay motivated, create better work, and make sure their business and themselves can prosper in the long run.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett. Today we are doing a solo episode, and it’s just gonna be me. We’re gonna dive a little bit into some pain and help you find some solutions around what I call creator entrepreneur burnout. So if you’re listening to this, if you like this show, you are probably a creator.

Whether that’s a course creator, a content creator, a media creator, an entrepreneur, you may be doing it full time. It might be a side hustle, what comes hand in hand with these activities? Burnout. And I see burnout everywhere in our industry. I’m constantly seeing entrepreneurs burnout, businesses fail that don’t need to.

And I want to unpack some different ways that you can. Work through burnout, recognize burnout, and eventually, or ultimately overcome it. The main thing here is when you’re a creator or you’re building a business as an entrepreneur, there’s this invisible emotional la labor of always having to be the expert, to be the, if you’re leading the company or you’re leading the business.

You have to have all the answers. You gotta come up with a strategy, you gotta do the execution. If you’re managing a team, you gotta guide the ship, if you will, and always being the expert can really burn you out. And one way to get past that is first in mindset of I don’t necessarily have all the answers.

I may not have all the resources, but I can be extremely resourceful. So learning when to. Say, I don’t know, but I’m gonna go find that and be okay with taking the time to go find the answer, to not be the expert, and do some research, some reading, some podcast listening, reaching out to a friend or mentor for guidance and help that can help reduce the emotional labor of having to always be the expert.

It’s also an indication when you feel that emotional labor. That it might be time to hire. Maybe you need a somebody who’s better than you at something, right? So I’ve done that a lot, like as a software company where I can’t write code. So I work with developers who know how to write code, and by definition, because I can’t write code.

They’re all better than me, but that’s okay. We’re all on the train together, and I love this quote I heard from someone once, which is just because you’re on the train, it doesn’t mean you have to carry the luggage. So you can put some of that emotional weight down of always having to be, the expert or the top, and manage absolutely everything.

Another thing that contributes to this pain, that kind of seeds, burnout. Is when passion turns into pressure. If you’re really driven like me, if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably a lifelong learner and you put a lot of pressure on yourself to continuously improve, to grow your business, to be a creator, create content, courses, businesses, webpage, all this stuff around your passion.

So hopefully there is some element of passion to what you do. Making money is great and building a business is awesome, but if you have some passion about what you do that can definitely help. But then it’s a double-edged sword because we’ve all heard that quote that, don’t build a business around your passion or whatever you love, because you’re gonna end up hating it.

There’s some truth to that. There’s truth to both sides. One side is be sure to build a business and be a creator around something that you’re truly passionate about. But the other side is you don’t have to take everything you’re passionate about and turn it into a business. ’cause that can be very exhausting.

So I am, as an example, I’m really into learning. Just learning, becoming better, like self-guided learning. That’s why I love empowering course creators to send out these positive ripples of learning out into the world. It really lights me up. It’s how I live my life. It’s how I raise my kids. It’s how I approach everything of just enjoying the learning that makes us hu human and empowering others to have great learning experiences and design great learning experiences.

I’m super passionate about that. I’m also passionate about some other things like travel or being outside in nature or some fitness and health stuff that I get into. If I were to take, let’s say, my ultra running passion, I’m a long distance runner. I recently completed a hundred mile run.

If the thought crossed my mind is, oh, should I create a course about that too? I could and it might be a good idea, but I don’t need to put myself under the stress of always having to turn every passion into a business. And the other thing that’s really important to know about burnout is it’s really easy to confuse fatigue with failure.

You might just be tired and need a break. All of us. Creator types and entrepreneur types. I know you can relate of going on vacation and all you’re doing is like thinking about work or, popping the laptop open and doing stuff while you’re supposed to be relaxing. So developing the skill of vacation and breaks and, time away and downtime and empty space is very powerful and it’s counterintuitive.

It almost doesn’t make sense in society. Because there’s this mass message and also mass challenge where, you know, for many the, they have the opposite problem. It’s about, getting to work and getting things done. But if you’re here on this show, I bet you have the opposite problem, which is you are trying to do too much and you need to chill a little bit.

I, this is a skill that I’m still trying to get better at. The older I got, the better I got at it. It’s been about 16 years as an entrepreneur and I’m way better at chilling or taking a break than I ever have been before. One major way I’ve done that is actually taking a six week sabbatical, which I’ve done a couple times, and that’s hugely beneficial.

There’s that saying that it really takes two weeks on vacation to actually start to settle down and unplug. So by giving yourself this massive six weeks or even longer gap, you can really give yourself a chance to overcome the fatigue that has built up the chronic fatigue that you have just gotten used to and normalized.

And you don’t always have to take a sabbatical. You can do, many things during the day. Like sometimes I’ll cut out for a run or go do something with my kids. Just learn how to take breaks. That’s just because you’re tired doesn’t mean your business is failing. You might need to take a break, even if things are tight. Like financially or you have deadlines, taking a break, getting good night’s sleep getting your mind off work can actually accelerate you and make you more productive.

So in terms of time and capacity like that. Time is a weird thing. I personally love productivity and, being on, I set up my office to be super productive. But this constant pressure you put on yourself to produce, can lead to burnout. And one of the biggest insights I wanna leave with you on this note, which can really help with burnout.

Is to value the time that you’re not really taking a break, but you’re not actively doing something. So if you sit down, like I’ll sit down in a chair over there and I actually have a 30 minute time block on my calendar where I call it strategy time to think strategically about the business with no specific focus beyond the prompt.

How do I create more value than anybody else in the world for my audience or my customers? So I’ll just sit with that question, be quiet and listen to what comes up. And that’s hugely relieving from a burnout perspective. ’cause when you’re in the weeds as an entrepreneur, as a creator particularly if you’re a solopreneur or you have a small team you’re constantly zooming in and zooming out.

By zooming out, you’re in the big picture, you’re thinking strategically, doing some high level project ideas, and then there’s this kind of medium layer where you’re doing more like project management and setting things up for yourself or for others. And then down in the weeds there’s like actually doing the work, right?

So actually executing. And as you burn out, what happens is the first thing to go, in my experience. Is the strategy gets weak, and then in the middle layer then the project management gets weak. And then as you go down and you get more burned out, your execution of the details gets weak. So if you see yourself, if burning out at the detail level that’s definitely you’re getting close to the red line of burnout.

So when you feel yourself start to be able to do better project management, to think strategically without pressure, you’re on an upward spiral out of burnout. And the thing about burnout is it’s a downward spiral.

It doesn’t happen from one trauma.

One trauma can cause a serious impact in your life.

But for the most part, the kind of burnout I’m talking about is a, it’s a downward spiral that’s slow. It’s methodical. You start normalizing how you feel every day and your energy levels and your focus levels and your productivity, and it just feels normal, but you’re actually spiraling down and the goal is to get on the upward spiral and we’ll talk about some more tools to get on the upward spiral, but in terms of productivity.

I like to unload my brain, so if you haven’t read the book, getting Things Done by David Allen, you gotta read it. It’s super old. The book changed my life. Some of the tools and filing systems and things mentioned in the book are outdated from a technology standpoint, but all the principles are rock solid.

So I’m constantly trying to remove parallel processing outta my brain. And what I mean by that is. I don’t want to have to like, have a subconscious routine running, trying to remember when my next meeting is, or I gotta schedule this thing, or I gotta be here at this time, or I have a good idea, I need to put that somewhere.

Or all kinds of things come up. So I’m constantly unloading my brain into a Google calendar, into Google documents that serve different functions on a notepad, on a piece of paper. Anytime something’s getting in my brain, that’s not what my main focus is for this time. I capture that in a digital or even paper brain, and that really helps reduce burnout because what happens is your head is like a cup and once you get too much water in there and it’s overflowing, you’re just very unproductive and on the downward spiral of burnout.

The other thing. Just a pro tip with calendaring that I recommend is a lot of people think of the calendar as just commitments to other people. You could even say the same thing about an email inbox, and I’ll give you a tip about that too. But make meetings with yourself, with time blocks on your calendar, ideally on a recurring basis to prioritize certain things, like I mentioned that 30 minutes of strategic thinking time on Friday.

I also have a block for like HR related tasks in my company on Fridays. And that way if an HR idea pops up. I put it where I capture that. Then when I get to my HR block on my calendar. It’s already waiting for me and I know what I need to work on. Or I respect that calendar invite, the same way I respect a meeting with somebody else who’s showing up on a Zoom call or in person at an event or something like that.

So use your counter for yourself. I also email myself, so if I’m out running just like the whole thing where you have good business ideas in the shower and all that, it happens to me when I’m running or walking or out in nature. And I’ll pop open my phone when I have that idea. Do a voiced text memo to my inbox and just capture that.

Just get outta my head and then my brain can relax so I can get back to. Running or hiking or whatever I’m doing. But when you just let that stuff swirl around and you never capture it it feels like you’re being productive. But productivity is not so much something that happens in your brain, it’s something that happens through systems.

So I’m trying to give you a few systems here. And the most important thing is to unload your brain, reduce the amount of water carried in the cup. If you’re fortunate. I am to have the ability to be big picture, but also really down in the details. You gotta know which space you’re in and make time for those things.

So like for example, when I’m going deep on a project and I’m in execution mode, most of Wednesday is dedicated for just that and I push everything out outside of that. So my Wednesday workday from the outside, if you look at me like. Somebody who does work. I’m a founder of a company, but I also do a ton of work.

This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert.

I personally use pop-up maker on my LifterLMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level?

Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version.

Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.

And when I’m working on it, like a specific hard detailed, deep project, the best work I do on those is on Wednesdays. ’cause I make the space for that and I keep that commitment to myself. So the other thing is really just thinking about time in a different way. So like the big picture and the detailed work.

You can think about time in these different layers, right? There’s what, there’s, the moment you’re in right now, there’s like your day, there’s your week, there’s your month, there’s a quarter, there’s the year, there’s your three year and five year or even 10 year vision. These are all very different. Zoom in, zoom out levels on time.

And the key is. If you’re a creator, entrepreneur, you’re highly creative, you’re highly innovative, problems and opportunity everywhere, and what happens is you may be zoomed out thinking, seeing all these problems and opportunities and all these strategies and all these things you want to do, and you try to jam it all into your day or into your week or into your month, and you just overfill it.

So I’ve been through lots of iterations on this in terms of, annual planning systems, quarterly planning setting up the week on Sunday with priorities, doing my three most important things I need to get done today. I’ve tried a lot of these things and I still do a lot of those things, but the key is to have a system for each layer of time and know when.

Schedule time to be in those different layers of time. So that’s just a really powerful way to just change a relationship with time and not overfill yourself. And the cool thing with capturing an idea for later is once you, I also, we also do a process at LifterLMS called Shape Up.

There’s a book about it that the folks at 37 Signals wrote, which I highly recommend from a business planning and focus and prioritization and strategizing down to a plan system. I highly recommend Shape Up. It’s life changing, but whether you do shape up or something like quarterly planning or annual planning, the key to avoiding burnout.

Is to not plan what you want to get done in a year and then work on all those things simultaneously. You have to give yourself permission to put something important on the back burner and you can always front load and prioritize whatever you think is the most important, but give yourself permission to have things wait and not work on too many things simultaneously.

’cause when you work on too many things simultaneously. That’s where the burnout, downward spiral just starts kicking up a notch. The other thing is to think about as a creator and as an entrepreneur, the dance and the balance between quality and consistency. So they’re both important, but if I had to choose one, I would choose consistency in terms of preventing burnout.

Of course, we always wanna increase the quality. The work we do, the courses we make. The videos, we make the podcasts. And we make, the blogs, we write, all the our website. We just want to constantly improve quality. But what’s more important is showing up, every day, week, month, year, on a mission with vision, with values, and just consistently moving ahead.

And being okay with not everything being a hundred percent perfect. The other thing that I find really helpful to avoid burnout is to. When it comes to being a creator, whether you’re creating a course or creating content. Podcast episodes. YouTube videos, blog articles, website, landing pages, marketing emails.

The way I like to teach this or describe this, is to look at the act of writing as, excuse me, as three parts, three equal parts. So the first part is research. The second part is writing. The third part is editing. All right? And we’re not even talking about publishing and promotion. That’s a whole other thing.

But what happens as a creator if we look through the lens of writing, is if there’s a problem, I can almost guarantee that one of those three areas is getting missed entirely. Or you are way over index on one part and not the other two. So if you’re going to, let’s say, just to use a really specific example, if I was gonna write what I believe would be a pillar, SEO piece of content for my website, I might give myself three days to do that.

Three days of deep work. So instead of just jumping in and looking at the blank screen and being like, all right, let’s go, let’s see what I can get done in three days. I’m not gonna touch that. The writing part. On the first day, it’s all gonna be like research outlining just thinking and really structuring and looking at other similar pieces of content and doing research into the ideas I want to talk about and that sort of thing.

So I would put a day in the research, I would put a day into actually writing it, and then I would put another full day into rewriting, editing. Ideally making it shorter ’cause we tend to put too much in. So good editing often comes up with something that’s shorter and really spend equal times in the research, the writing and the editing.

And if you adopt that system, your quality’s gonna go up and your consistency will go up. If you value writing and you want to, if you were just writing as an example. I would have three days, or at least three solid blocks of time every week on a repeating recurring calendar reminder to gimme the system and the space to commit to what I wanted to do with my content creation.

So that’s how to think about it. If you spend too much time, like in research, you might build this giant list of keywords and all this content you want to create. And that’s good to do. But if you never actually write anything. That’s a problem. Or if you write a lot of stuff and never edit it and you just ship it and move on to the next thing, you’re leaving opportunity on the table.

So those are just some pro tips and it’ll feel you will start to burn out if all you’re doing is just one of those things. Like constantly just editing. Or constantly just researching or constantly writing without research or editing this, these, that’s the downward spiral to burnout. And in terms of just one more pro tip there, when it comes to content, whether that’s courses or videos or blogs, sometimes you don’t always need to create a new piece of content.

You just need to go back to one of your greatest hits. And either make it better or burn it down and start over knowing what you know now and just replace that content or that lesson video. So you, this idea that you’re on this infinite treadmill where you have to create content and it’s always gotta be new and it’s always gotta, you gotta do all this content creation across 15 different platforms.

That’s a recipe for burnout. So it’s more about focus systems and priorities. The other thing that really helps with burnout for entrepreneur creators is to work on the isolation issue. It’s funny because entrepreneurs are often perceived as, these extroverted people that are, famous or famous in their niche.

Or just hard chargers. Maybe they’re, you’re leading a team and you’re just out there, right? But the goal is to not be isolating. Even being in a leadership role can be isolating because as a leader you are oftentimes, you have your business relationship with your colleagues and your coworkers and your industry partners and stuff.

But, and some of those people you’ll be friends with, and that’s awesome. But also you need to take a break. Get out of the driver’s seat, maybe hang out with an entrepreneur buddy. Share a problem, share a win, ask for some advice, and just get outside of the go go. Always leading all, always. Just cranking out work product and take a little break. And just, you don’t have to do it alone. The weird like dichotomy of it all is that entrepreneur creators are some of the most productive people there. There are, but there they can be that act. And if you’re like me, you might. I’ve had this thought before.

I basically once I got into my entrepreneur creator flow, there is no end to what I could do. I will, I’m not bored. I will not. There’s all kinds of fun, interesting things to do, and that’s infinite. Taking a break is important, but also not being alone. Just as like a hyper-productive person is if you’re alone like that all the time.

It’s a recipe for burnout. And that includes things like, even if you’re not great at it, trying to turn off and spend time with your family, without your phone getting out outside, moving your body instead of your mind or your, fingers on the keyboard or whatever. Ideally, see some people in your town, even just going to the coffee shop or the grocery store could be a cathartic experience.

And also just realize that particularly among entrepreneur and creator communities, people help other people. But sometimes you have to be vulnerable and ask for help and reach out to somebody even if it’s a stranger and. Look for an opportunity to connect, and not everybody will say yes, and you can always reach out to people you already know or rekindle old friendships, old colleague relationships and things like that.

But that’s an important thing. That takes time, that really deserves a block on your calendar. If you have the resources to add people to your team. If you’re that solopreneur stage, there’s nothing more. Exciting and burnout reducing than getting help, whether that’s a virtual assistant, a designer, somebody to help with a piece or even take over more of a leadership role of a key aspect of the business.

So those are some pro tips on dealing with creator entrepreneur Burnout is really unfortunate. Because I see it everywhere. It’s happened to me many times. I’ve been through the fire. I get better at it, but I still struggle with it. And I want you to know that you’re not alone and you’re not broken.

And if you’re struggling with burnout, it really needs to be addressed. And this episode is not, medical or healthcare advice. Sometimes it makes sense to talk with a professional and just get, professional set of eyes on your situation to help you basically get out of your own way and get out of the mindset and the, thought patterns and behavior patterns that you have that can be really helpful.

So recommend doing that. But if you’re on burnout, be careful and just don’t mistake your fatigue for failure. You might just need to. Reset or just at least get back on the upward spiral instead of the downward spiral. ’cause it really does happen to everybody. And in the world that we live in with infinite content information and demands and all the world issues and everything, it can be very overwhelming.

All that stuff contributes to burnout. So keep going, but take a break. Work on your burnout. Build systems. If there’s anything I can ever do to help you. Please reach out and I hope you have a rest, great rest of your day and keep being a creator. Keep being an entrepreneur. These are very important parts of what we do in the world and what we’re called to do. It can be very fulfilling.

So just be ke, be careful with that fatigue. Don’t normalize it. ’cause there’s a better way to work on it. And it’s not like there’s a magic bullet. It’s more of a commitment you make to yourself to be open about burnout and getting on the upward spiral and surrounding yourself with people, tools, systems, and ideas that will help with that.

Have a great rest of your day.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

The post Creator Burnout Is Killing Businesses Here’s How to Survive appeared first on LMScast.