Content Burnout: What To Do For Real (part 2: party of one)

The previous post on this subject was good advice for working with a content team and generating ideas to overcome burnout. But what if you are (as I so often am) working alone? How do you coax your brain into a creative space and generate a wealth of ideas by yourself?

Working by yourself has good and bad aspects. You don’t have to schedule, wrangle, or coordinate other people, for one. You don’t have to manage their egos and personal goals, or elicit better, more useful participation.

On the other hand, you are more subject to your own biases and constraints. Even at their most creative, most of your ideas will be coming from your own experience and perspective, so there are intrinsic limitations.

Whether it’s better to work alone or manage a team is probably a subject for a different post, but I will digress for a moment. Being a good leader means subjugating your own ego, impulses, and personal gratification for the good of the team. You have to be willing, to some extent, to dim your own shine to reflect and enhance theirs. You have to sacrifice some of your own personal ambitions and desire for recognition in order to get out of the way, and instead be happy with their successes and their achievement. This is not easy to do; it requires a lot of self-awareness and self-restraint. It also means that some of your most difficult work will be invisible, unappreciated, and unrewarded.

An ideal situation would be to strike a balance between the two. For example, to lead and coach and mentor the team up into the position of being able to autonomously manage ongoing tasks, freeing you up to devote personal attention to new initiatives or developments. In the specific situation we’ve been discussing, perhaps you could coach the first 2-3 quarterly brainstorming sessions and then delegate them and step away. But, as I mentioned, that’s a subject for another post.

Right now we’re focusing on being an idea machine of one, coaching yourself into being more creative and beating your own burnout.

As called out previously, we still need to separate the executive from the executor function. Do not waste the extra time it takes to think, then do, then think, then do… avoid expensive task switching.

Here’s how to do it:

Carve out the time. Set aside an hour specifically for brainstorming. Do it offsite, if at all possible; first thing in the morning or last thing after work, so that your thoughts are more clear and focused on the task at hand. If you are a morning person, set aside a morning, block your calendar, and tell everyone you’ll be an hour late working offsite. I have also taken my laptop to a cafe for lunch (to clear my head and get into the present moment) and then stayed at the cafe for an extra hour brainstorming. If I’m freelancing, I’ve been known to do it in the evening with a glass of wine (no judging!).

All ideas are welcome. Write down everything you think, without pausing to think about whether it’s a good idea or executable or what any other opinion might be. The idea is to generate a large number of ideas; you’ll sort out the good ideas later.

Clear the low-hanging fruit. As I mentioned before, the first 10-15 ideas are going to be derivative and not very creative. I go ahead and accelerate this process by actively generating easy ideas. I go ahead and write down a massive list of the internet’s most basic headline formulations:

• x Things You Didn’t Know About y
• x Reasons You are Missing Out on y
• x Ways to Take Advantage of y
• x Myths and Truths About y
• x Secrets About y

This process is assisted by simply paying attention to what trends on social channels, but there is also a lot of research about popular headline formats. Look at these (but not during your brainstorm; do it before):

• https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/types-of-blog-headlines
• https://www.copyblogger.com/10-sure-fire-headline-formulas-that-work/
• http://buzzsumo.com/blog/most-shared-headlines-study/
• http://digg.com/2017/most-popular-headline-formats

These kinds of headline formulations aren’t particularly inspired, but help you generate a large number of easily executed content ideas very quickly. If you’re using a “things you didn’t know” headline formulation, you can write 5 things you didn’t know about my industry, 5 things you didn’t know about my product, 5 things you didn’t know about my company, 5 things you didn’t know about my CEO, etc. Add these to your brainstorming list; they will keep your content mill going, and allowing yourself to explore these ideas may lead somewhere interesting.

If you’ve written down all your easy, content-mill ideas, and they haven’t inspired or led you somewhere, and you still have time left in your session, turn your thoughts to your customer. What do they read? What do they want to know? Not just about your company or product, but in their lives; what do they care about, what are they motivated by, interested in? What problems are they trying to solve, what challenges are they facing, what do they dream of and hope for? Write down every headline your customer would click on and read, regardless of whether it has anything to do with your company, industry, or product.

Finally, if these other trains of free-flowing thought haven’t taken you there (and generally speaking, they will, since all trains of thought lead here eventually) think about your passion. Do you genuinely, authentically care about your job, your company, your industry? Why? What’s special about it? What moves you? What do you need to say, need to share, need people to understand? There will often come a moment where you feel a sense of urgency, that everyone would love this as much as you do if only they understood it properly… THAT’S what you’ve been looking for, THAT is the heart of your message, and what you should be developing your content on. That passion is your own unique, authentic, unrepeatable voice, and it’s what should be expressed in your work.

(Side note: this part is often easiest to do by yourself rather than with a team. It involves a level of introspection and vulnerability that can be awkward to explore with other people. But you have to bring this passion and devotion back to the team, back to your work.

Second side note: yes, I know we are not all blessed with a true passion for our jobs, but in most jobs there is still something in the core of the company that is reflected in the core of our person. Another subject for another post.)

Once you’ve reached and explored a pile of ideas related to your personal passion, go ahead and stop brainstorming. You’ve done great work.

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Later, go back over your list and search for the correlations. In an ideal situation, you will find a whole lot of correlations between your passion and your customer’s aspirations. And that is the core of your entire content strategy.

Stay tuned for ONE MORE post on this subject, where I share my personal matrix for building these raw ideas out into a plan

Image courtesy of Daniel Lobo on flickr