Content Burnout: What To Do For Real (part 1: leverage your team)

Okay, that post I wrote last week was true and accurate. It’s based on best practices widely circulated amongst content marketers, and very good advice. You can read it anywhere. But now I’m going to level with you, as a creative professional.

In battling burnout, you need to understand a little bit about how the brain works. First, let’s talk about task-switching.

Task-switching is cognitively expensive. For a long time, there was a big hiring emphasis on the ability to multi-task at work, and now there’s a lot of blowback about the downside of multitasking. In actuality, multi-tasking isn’t the problem; it’s the cognitive cost of task-switching. There’s a widely-cited “40% of your time” figure, but the original study says “as much as 40%”. The actual cognitive expense varies depending on role, task, and individual.

For example, I try to never schedule a production artist to work on more than two projects in a day. I know the process of reaching a good milestone or stopping place, updating everything, saving everything, and closing a project, THEN opening the new project, checking all the documentation to find out what’s currently going on and what the targets are, re-orient themselves to the new task ahead of them, and begin work on the new project costs a LOT of time. I can accept the loss of that production time once a day, and often divide their days at lunchtime (returning from lunch always involves a little bit of brain re-gathering anyway, so it’s efficient to divide the days like that). But I can’t afford the loss of production multiple times a day. Unless it’s absolutely unavoidable, I won’t plan, budget, or schedule for anything shorter than half a day for a production artist. I also take into account the individual, since I often know how they work, the goals and targets, and technology and other uncontrolled factors (I have worked places where projects/scenes/shots take forever to load, which just adds to the time loss).

However, for myself, constant interruptions are the state of being, and it’s relatively “cheap” for me to pause in the middle of an email to take a phone call, answer a question, or step into a meeting. I feel as though I’m capable of managing interruptions efficiently, and knowing when and how to carve out time to concentrate.

Whatever the actual time/percentage loss is in task switching, keep in mind that it’s expensive; you’re losing time perhaps better spent elsewhere.

The second thing to remember about the brain is that your leadership functions and your follower functions are not the same. Part of your brain is really good at having ideas and making plans, but it’s a different part of your brain that is good at following through on those plans. Think of one part of your brain as the leader and a different part as the assistant. The leader makes the to-do list, the assistant carries it out. And going back and forth between being executive and executor is task switching.

In other words, thinking of something to write, and then writing it, and then thinking of something else to write, and writing it, and so on, is the slowest possible way to create content, and it quickly leads to burnout.

To beat burnout, do all your creative thinking at once, and then execute later.

Doing your creative thinking with a team: how to run a good brainstorming meeting

• Change your surroundings. In a perfect world, this meeting would be offsite, in a new and different (but comfortable and conducive) environment. You want people away from their phones and workplace distractions, and bringing them somewhere new (even if you’re borrowing a meeting room from a local library or university) will stimulate creativity.
• Mix up the team. As mentioned in the previous post, look for inspiration from other departments. Invite a couple people from other departments and encourage them to participate.
• Bind it in time, and set ambitious goals. Be clear that the session won’t last longer than an hour, but then set a very high goal. For example “We’re going to be here for an hour, and we’re going to come up with 200 ideas for blog posts”. The exact number depends on how many people you have and what your expectations are. Setting a very high number in a short amount of time encourages people to come up with ideas fast and springboard off of each other.
• Write down everything. I like to use those big poster-sized postits so they can be saved for later review. If you’re using a whiteboard, take pictures to document the ideas. The idea is that the writing be as fast as the ideas, so that everything gets captured and preserved, but nothing is precious or set in stone.

Rules for brainstorming: all ideas are good ideas, the point is to have ideas and have lots of them. Be clear that you aren’t making any final decisions today (your “assistant-brain” will sort it out later), just having as many ideas as possible. Do not allow people to get bogged down debating merits or execution of ideas, or questioning whether some ideas are related or the same as others; the point is quantity and creativity. Don’t judge whether it’s a good idea or realistic idea or whether it’s been done… just take the idea and move on quickly.

The rule of “more than 15”: Back to your brain for a moment. Your brain is lazy. Your brain doesn’t like to spend more energy than necessary. This means that the first 10-15 ideas you or anyone has will be derivative; you will have seen/read/heard it before. This is just your brain trying to answer the question as efficiently as possible without working too hard. You have to have more than 15 ideas before your brain starts realizing it really has to work at this and put some thought into it. It’s ideas after number 16 that will start to be more original, unique, and creative (this is also why you set a high target number for your meeting; not only does it curb debate and discussion, but it pushes people past this threshold).

After the meeting, wait a day or two and then go back over the ideas. Toss out what you’ve done before, combine things that are similar, and refine some of them to be stronger. Create a “maybe” list for things you’re on the fence about. But you should have a decent list of strong content that you can create. Furthermore, this kind of activity strengthens the team and deepens employee engagement. Schedule them quarterly, and mix up the participants a bit each time.

If you’re me, you schedule brainstorms for the end of the workday and let them transition into happy hour; a lot of times, people will be enthusiastic and want to keep talking and sharing with each other, and I try to encourage it when possible.

Believe it or not, I have still more to say on this subject; stay tuned!

image courtesy of modup.net