the Season for Burnout

 

'Tis the Season for Burnout

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Weekly art news, tips and advice View this email in your browser During the busy season, it can seem impossible to get everything done, let alone set aside the time to practice self-care. When you make most of your money during a few months of the year, it can be tempting to go into overdrive to get every last drop out of the holidays. But this will not only leave you drained, lead to burnout, and take the joy out of your job, it also encourages less productive work.   Here are some self care habits that we have personally found helpful during the holiday season, even though they may be counterintuitive.    When you think you are too busy to take a break, that's when to take a break. Commit to slowing your days down. Work more intentionally and step away from your work with intention. Walk to the coffee shop and chat with the barista for a few minutes. Cook your dinner instead of getting take out. Turn your email alerts off during lunch. If you can, walk to your errands instead of driving. Give yourself permission to fully turn off from whatever you are working on by giving yourself a time limit.    Increase your prices. You need to have your work at competitive market prices and charge at your skill level, but working endless hours for an unfair wage will only lead to massive stress. The best part? You are in charge of the wages you make. Treat yourself with the respect you would treat a hardworking employee. When you are tired, drink more water than coffee and eat before you get "hangry." When we de-prioritize sleep, eating healthy meals, moving our bodies, and socializing, we tend to trudge through the process and go through the motions — leaving us feeling uninspired and empty. This comes through in our work and we quickly burn out or break down. Balance your water intake with your caffeine intake. Make sure you aren’t just downing coffee and don't wait until it's an emergency to eat something … we are looking at you! Don’t wait until it’s an emergency or past 2pm to get something to eat! Consider sleeping a part of your long-term success strategy. Remind yourself that there is only so much you can realistically accomplish in one day and don’t worry about the rest until the morning. If you have trouble shutting your mind off, remind yourself of what you did accomplish that day—even if it’s as small as writing some emails and going for a walk!   Prioritize and foster personal relationships. Being an artist and business owner often means you are going at it solo for many hours of the day. By default, being an artist is often a process done in solitude—and we often veer toward isolation. Don’t forget about the relationships you have with your friends and family. Too often it is easy to let these relationships be the first thing to go when we are in the middle of a busy season. When it’s hard to even remember to eat, socializing is often first on the chopping block. Doing small acts of kindness for your friends or family reminds us that it is about more than this momentary stress.  Set low expectations & over-communicate, even if something goes wrong. If you have taken on a bunch of holiday orders, you are probably feeling the pressure. Make sure you are clear about the deadline for the last day for orders and make it even earlier than you feel comfortable with. If you need three weeks to make and ship orders, make that deadline for the holidays six weeks prior to Christmas for custom orders (it can be shorter for pre-made objects). You want to avoid working in survival mode. Even if something doesn’t go quite as planned during the process (and it always does), letting your customers know you had a kiln failure etc. keeps them in the loop and lets them in on the blood, sweat, and tears that went into your artwork. Customers are real people, after all. Carve out time early on to get organized. If you’re scrambling to make last-minute price lists, invoices, or to find important details about artworks, you are causing yourself unnecessary stress and wasting time. The more organized you are, the less stressed out you become. Setting aside a half day a week for administrative tasks like updating your website, making sure you have communicated with your customers and packing and shipping work streamlines the process so you can spend the rest of the week making work. Blocking out this time allows you to work efficiently and not context switch every day between the business work and the making work. Using a system like Artwork Archive allows you manage your art business from anywhere, on one platform. You can easily generate lists of your work for galleries, make invoices, find details about your artworks and gain insights into your business.