That’s about 2,000 words a day. I felt great the first 4 days, awful the next 2 days, and burned out on the last day. Then, I took a half day’s rest to try to recuperate. It didn’t work out that way.

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I find myself repeating this cycle. A cycle that seems to have plagued me since I started writing every day 4 months ago. I quit my job and was eager to show the world that I was serious about my writing career.

4 months on, this is what I have learned about venturing out on my own as a business owner and freelance writer and the working routine that came with it. Trust me, it’s not all sunshine and roses.

I aimed to publish daily, and I achieved that in 3 months

I still remember the first day I set out this goal. I have just come back from a long holiday in New Zealand in August 2021, and I was sitting in the comforts of my home, furiously planning the long-term future of my content writing business.

I aim to establish a solid foundation in writing high-quality articles for clients and build up my content and brand at the same time. I started off writing about 2 long-form content at about 1,000 to 1,500 words per week.

One long-form article will typically take me about 2 to 3 days from start to finish. And they were fun. This point is important as I will explore what this means to a writer and creative in general.

After about 1 month, I find myself wanting to do more. I started designing infographics to go with the articles to post and I found that the engagement was way higher for them as people were just mainly scrolling through on their mobile phone.

Hence, I started to design at least two infographics to go with the two articles I was writing for the website. I have since reduced my time of writing an article from 2 to 3 days to just half a day. The other half a day was spent designing the infographics for it.

I want to add also that during this time, I was writing for 3 companies every week. In total, I was now writing 5 articles a week by then, logging in a total of about 6,000 words. I was tired but felt great about my pace of writing.

As I continued this process for another 1 month, I found myself being more efficient and productive and realised that I had quite a bit of free time. Mind you, I was spending about 6 to 7 hours from Monday to Wednesday working on numerous stuff and was essentially done with everything I wanted to do by the mid-day of Thursday.

This is the first mistake.

So I started pencilling in more things to do for the remainder of Thursday and Friday. I was already publishing a monthly newsletter which came to about 3,000 words so why not do this every week? And I can increase the amount of long-form articles by one more to 3 per week. I can maximize my time and increase my productivity even more by doing more.

This is the second mistake.

From a month ago until now, I have essentially achieved my objective of publishing daily for Slice of PIE, from Monday to Sunday.

And it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

You see, I have been feeling burned out all along

It’s just that I didn’t notice it that much initially. My wife has always complained that my, being an advocate, was problematic. I pushed myself for no good reason, and often find myself burned out.

When I was working in the central bank and most recently a unit trust fund management company, I pushed myself to the maximum, researching and producing as many things as possible without regard to my own physical and mental health.

Advocates, after all, can put themselves through long working hours as they believe (most oftentimes misguided) that they are changing things even just for a little.

When I came out and worked for myself, I didn’t notice this for myself as in my mind, I was building something of my own.

I should have noticed the first cracks when I could not focus for longer than 30 minutes when writing articles. This got worse further along the week when I was already logging in about 5,000 words and was trying to complete the remaining 1,000 words.

And it didn’t stop there, as I pencilled in more things, the burned-out feeling got worse and worse, and I found myself seeking out entertainment to make that feeling go away.

What I didn’t realise was that this was a signal from the body that this was unsustainable.

The burnout came in full force recently after I wrote 12,000 words in 7 days.

Remember when I said burnout comes in cycles? I want to add that they also vary in intensity, and will come in full if we leave them unchecked.

Here’s the content I wrote in the past week:

1. 3 articles for 3 companies: 2,500 words
2. 3 long-form articles for Slice of PIE: 4,000
3. 2 Infographics for long-form articles
4. 1 weekly newsletter: 2,000 words
5. 1 monthly newsletter: 3,500 words

After completing that final monthly newsletter, my mind was just screaming. My heart was racing. My anxiety and panic attacks were back in full, and it was the first time in months that I had such a full-blown attack.

And what’s even sadder, I hated the process. It wasn’t fun at all. The quest for more things being done is endless. I should have known. I am an economist after all. There is a theory that efficiency and productivity will increase and then peak at a certain point. After that, it comes back down again the more you do. The law of diminishing returns in full display here.

Here’s what I have learned

That no man is an island. I can’t be doing it all, and I can’t be forcing myself to produce more things one after another.

Part of the reason why I didn’t want a corporate working life anymore was because I didn’t want to go from one rat race to another. But that has happened exactly even in my own business.

I was continuously striving for more in less time, even though I was already producing a lot of content. I didn’t know how to stop, because I only knew how to add things onto my plate.

The quest for more is a trap, which ultimately becomes a prison. You are caged in by your insecurities of not feeling like you have done enough, so you do even more. And the more I did, the more I felt trapped.

Fun and joy were what kept me alive and well. I had it initially, but I lost them when I did too much. My writing also suffered as a result. I wanted to get things out of the door as soon as possible to move on to the next item on the list. A list to which I kept adding things to.

And help. I have to admit that when I first started my business, I thought I could do it all. Now I know I can’t. I have been considering hiring part-time designers and writers to help me with my content, and now I feel like this will be it.

The only problem I have now is that I haven’t figured out a way to monetize my writing. This is something that I have been thinking long and hard, and I don’t expect it to be easy.

Conclusion

If you find yourself losing some of your passion and fun in what you are doing, I hope this experience of mine will help you contextualise what it means to produce as a writer and business owner.

Even if you are in a different field, all these things will apply to you. The most important thing is that you don’t lose that ‘fun’ that you experience while doing the things you are doing.

If you do, consider taking a step back to reassess what you are doing and find within yourself, the source of this.

You don’t want this cycle of being burned out constantly to come back and hit you like a truck deeper in the future.