The Dangers of Burnout

Welcome to Daylight Saving Time, the best time of the year, in my opinion! The days are longer, the weather's starting to warm up, and the bushes in my yard are finally getting some green on them!

With all the nice weather, we often begin to feel more motivated to work, whether it's outside or cleaning the house or getting started on all those projects we've been putting off all winter. There's a renewed sense of "I can do this!" But sometimes, it can be dangerous. 

We're all familiar with taking on too much, especially as editors. Especially when we're trying to grow our business and get as many clients as possible. It's a great prospect, believe me, and it can be effective if you play your cards right and have all the time in the world. However, if you're not used to doing that, it can be extremely detrimental to your mental health as well as your client base.

When you're working for someone else and trying to prove yourself, it's so important to take care of yourself too and not put too much on your plate. While a client might think it's great that you always have availability, your quality of work will go down if you're trying to do too much at once. It's better to focus all your attention on one story than divide it up. This will create a higher probability of you not catching mistakes or not explaining yourself properly because you have so many different things to complete before the deadline. To combat that, extending your deadline too much might cause you to lose a client that can't wait that long, or that's on their own deadline.

I tried this and learned my limit very quickly. I can work on two projects at a time, with maybe something very quick while I'm working on those, but nothing more than that or I can't keep up. The stories blend together, I can't keep characters straight, and it's hard to bounce back and forth between stories and authors and styles; it just gets tiring. 

Potential clients are going to want to go for quality, not necessarily turnaround time. Good clients, that will become repeat clients, will wait on your schedule because they want you to work on their books, which is a much better feeling than stressing yourself out and exhausting yourself by trying to do too much. It'll be worth it in the end, and when it's over, you'll still enjoy editing instead of seeing it as a chore.