Starting a podcast can be an exciting venture. But a couple of months in when you realize the road is often paved with late-night editing, extensive recording sessions and you find yourself stretched too thin, that excitement may start to wane.

With the recent influx of podcasters hitting the airways and an endless stream of content covering every topic you could think of, there is intense pressure to consistently deliver unique, engaging content in a space brimming with competition. It's no wonder that content creators are at high risk of burnout and that it is becoming more pervasive.

With increasing focus on the importance of mental health, we are beginning to uncover the dangers of workplace fatigue and realizing that burnout can have serious consequences on health and productivity.

Before we explore the strategies podcasters can you employ to avoid this fate, we should first clarify what burnout is and how to identify the signs.

✴ What is Burnout?

First coined by Herbert Freudenberger in his 1974 book ‘Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement’, burnout is best described as a loss of motivation in your work, resulting from a combination of chronic mental, emotional, and physical exhaustion that has been left unmanaged.

This can apply to any job or activity, but creatives are at particularly high risk. Running a podcast is a demanding operation and unless you can spot the signs of burnout early on, you may find yourself struggling to keep up with your recording schedule, which puts both your health and operation at risk.

✴ 5 Common Signs of Burnout

Fortunately, burnout doesn't happen overnight; there are signs you can look out for. By familiarizing yourself with the triggers and symptoms of burnout, you can make the necessary changes that will keep your health (and podcast) on track.

✴ A Lack of Energy

People experiencing burnout will start to notice their energy levels dwindling, leaving them feeling tired and fatigued. You may feel emotionally drained or find yourself struggling to cope with day-to-day activities.

However, it's vital to distinguish this weariness from the effects of a poor sleep schedule, non-work-related stress, or a physical ailment.

✴ Loss of Interest in Your Work

While it's completely normal to experience a lack of motivation from time to time, if the idea of a day's work becomes too much, it might be time to reconsider your strategy. There will be times throughout your podcasting career when the task at hand is far from thrilling, but if your loss of interest persists for weeks on end, you may be in the early stages of burnout.

✴ Physical Pain

Burnout is not always easy to identify, meaning it is can often be tolerated until it has progressed from an emotional toll to also impacting physical health. Some people can go on to experience physical manifestations of chronic stress including headaches, stomach pain or digestive issues.

✴ Loss of Creative Ambition and Enthusiasm

While similar to a loss of interest in your work, losing your ambition poses a much more serious threat to the future of your career and podcast development. It's crucial to maintain a healthy sense of enthusiasm in your creative endeavors, especially when working in the competitive podcasting market. If you are experiencing burnout, you may notice that you struggle to concentrate on tasks or have reached a prolonged creative block.

✴ A Sustained Dip in Episode Quality

As a much more objective symptom than the others, failing job performance can be easily identified. Audience polls and vocal listeners will alert you to a sustained decline in your episode quality. Although performance can be influenced by many outside factors, if your podcast has suddenly taken a turn for the worst, you very well could be suffering from burnout.

✴ What if You are Experiencing Burnout?

Most podcasters will experience burnout in some way, at some point along their journey. It’s almost inevitable. However, by making a few changes to your routine both at work and in your personal life, you can protect yourself from the threat of future burnout or at least manage it so that it doesn’t negatively affect your podcast.

Here are a few ways you can make reduce your workload:

✴ Outsourcing Your Tasks

Taking on a podcast is a tremendous responsibility. From research, hosting, marketing, and editing, it can be a demanding task. Fortunately, podcasting doesn't have to be a one-person operation, with many podcasters choosing to outsource repetitive tasks. Even the king of podcasting himself, Joe Rogan, still hires an outside editor to clean up his raw footage.

By bringing in the help of external, independent professionals, you can open your podcast to an array of advantages that will relieve your stress and help prevent burnout. These include:

Increased efficiency - Podcasters that do everything themselves are often cursed with higher research, development, and distribution costs, all of which must be recouped through ad deals and sponsorships. By employing the cost structure and expertise of outside hires, you can increase the efficiency of your podcast for a fraction of the price.

Focus on the creative - Podcasters often have to stretch their time and attention across every facet of the process. Outsourcing allows you to shift the menial day-to-day tasks of your production, so you can focus on the more engaging aspects of your business.
Reduced risk - Too often podcasters can get caught up in the pitfalls of running a business, and the fear of failing can leave them working seemingly endless hours to try and keep afloat. By utilizing outside hires, you can rely on professional editors to adapt and enhance your production process, bolstering the standard of your content, and reducing the risk of declining episode quality.
Moving between tasks quickly - A huge source of burnout is a stagnant workflow. Whereas completing a project in-house could take days of headache-inducing effort, a good outsourcing service should have the facilities to take on projects immediately. By passing that task off to an outside hire you can clear your schedule for fresh, compelling projects.

✴ Automation

Automation allows you to program a computer to carry out some of your repetitive daily tasks. Much like outsourcing, automation streamlines your operation, allowing you to optimize your audio adjustments by employing a series of editing timestamps. These basic program functions apply a selection of pre-determined edits, thus relieving your editing burden. Automation is a popular way to avoid the dangers of burnout and acts as a low-cost, high reward system for professional-quality edited content.

✴ Creating Master Files

As any seasoned podcaster will tell you, a well implemented filing system will help maximize the efficiency of your recording and editing process. Creating master files is a relatively easy task that will save you a lot of stress when it comes to editing.

Create a master folder - Your master folder will be ground zero for all your other work, with everything to do with your podcast being stored here.
Create a sub-folder for your assets - The trick to an efficient podcasting operation is building assets, which include items like episode templates or reoccurring intros. By storing all of your assets in one place, you can instantly drag them into your document, allowing you to quickly build your episodes.
Create a sub-folder for your episodes - It's vital to keep a sense of order in your podcast filing system, otherwise you may find yourself unnecessarily struggling to navigate your documents. When it comes to individual episode sub-files, naming is everything. It’s worth using specific information to identify your episode e.g. episode number - name of guest, or an acronym for the title of the episode.
Create a sub-folder for your archives - The archive subfolder will be where you store all of your past work, acting like a catalog of your podcasting history.
Create a sub-folder for your segments - Depending on the structure of your podcast, it may be best to consider a segment sub-folder. This is where you'll file all of your individual recordings before editing them.

In essence, creating a master file is about building a foolproof system, one that anybody could follow to produce your content to the same standard. It's through this simple, paint by numbers approach that you can pass off your work to outside professionals and have peace of mind that your episode quality won't see a decline.

Podcasters and other creatives are particularly susceptible to the dangers of burnout, which is why it's crucial to create a sustainable workflow. With a little organization and through delegation of repetitive tasks, either through outsourcing or automation, you can relieve yourself of the burdens of the end-to-end podcasting process. This will help foster a positive workspace and a healthy creative mindset to keep your podcast flourishing.

For more information on how to streamline your podcasting process, and how to keep on top of your mental health, check out our free growth guide here.

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How To Avoid Podcaster Burnout