Struggling with busy season burnout? I feel you, deep in my bones!
Let’s see if we can fix that.
Welcome to the series that I affectionately call The Busy Season Survival Guide!
Named after my annual pre-tax season bullet journal spreads, the Guide is a collection of the theories, lessons, and practical tips I’ve accumulated over a decade as a public accountant (who needs to engage in her creative hobbies to thrive… and burns out often).
I wrote this series through the lens of corporate burnout, but whether you have a similar role to mine, a creative one, or an entrepreneurial one, there’s something here for you!
I should note that while we’re focusing on burnout from overwork, there are other types of burnout as well. Chronic under-stimulation, lack of motivation, lack purpose and meaning, or hopelessness can also burn you out. The strategies for tackling these might be quite different.
But first…
What is a “Busy Season”?
A busy season is a finite but extended period of time where your workload increases considerably. During this time you’ll need to grind, to singularly focus your energy, and to push yourself to accomplish a goal.
For many of us public accountants, “busy season” is synonymous with personal tax season. It involves a very high volume of work and deadlines that happen at the end of three consecutive months. We also get bonus mini busy seasons sprinkled throughout the year. (Popular corporate tax filing deadlines and large deadlined jobs or projects, for example.)
Yours could look quite different! It could mean working on year-ends, budget seasons, completing large projects, putting on productions, event planning, and any work in industries with intense seasonality.
No matter what they look like, busy seasons demand more of you. They’re stressful, which over the duration of the season can (and often does) lead to burnout.
This is really the crux of the guide: minimizing exposure to, intensity of, and frequency of burnout.
(Why do we even subject ourselves to repetitive seasons of burnout? Click for a brief musing on when burnout is okay, and when to walk away.)
The Creative’s Guide to Corporate Burnout
At the heart of this blog is all of you creative souls trying to navigate the corporate world. It is hard enough for many of us to stay connected with our creativity after hours during regular periods. Throw in a busy season, and we really feel the impact.
Burnout is a depletion of energy, mental capacity, and motivation. When you’re burnt out, there’s hardly anything left for general day-to-day life, let alone our creative practices!
So burnout chokes off our creativity. It’s not just the lack of time and energy available, but the “survival mode” mindset that separates us from it. We easily become reactive and unfocused when we burn out. Our mindset lacks the senses of mental safety, ease and play that creativity thrives on.
It follows that in an episode of burnout, our creative practices either suffer greatly, or are eliminated altogether.
Yet our capacity for creativity is often the very thing that helps us tolerate our day-jobs in the first place!
That’s why I thought it important to address it here on the blog.
How the Guide Helps
Here’s what you can expect to gain from the guide:
Tips and ideas: The Guide is here to give you some inspiration and advice to prepare for a busy season, manage your energy and workflow, spot burnout early, engage in self-care, and recover quickly while you’re in the midst of your busy season.
Framework for your experience: On a larger scale, the guide itself is meant to help you contextualize your own busy season experience. This helps you feel more “in control” of the process. Rather than relying on reactive responses, you can anticipate what’s to come, understand what’s happening, and respond effectively.
Default responses: When you’re stressed or burnt out, it’s hard to take a step back and find what it is you really need to manage it or recover from it. We tend to default to the easiest (but perhaps not the healthiest or most effective) solutions to feel better. The Guide will help you “default” into a healthy and effective response, right when you start to feel the need for it.
Confidence and groundedness: Knowledge and understanding can help you walk into your busiest seasons feeling confident in your ability to manage throughout the entire process, freeing up your mental capacity to focus on the task(s) at hand.
We kick off the guide with some thought as to what burnout is, and what causes it. We then look at different ways to both prepare for the upcoming busy season and establish a healthy baseline before jumping in. Next we talk about workflow and self-care for when things are busy, and then we wrap it up with how to recover from burnout when you still have to work.
Let’s Get Started!
Walking through sequentially can be especially helpful when you have a busy season on the horizon.
If you’re here because you’re already in it though, jump ahead to the section that resonates! We’ll meet you right where you’re at.
The Guide breaks down into 5 parts:
Part 1: Breaking Down Burnout – understand what burnout is, why it happens, and how to spot it.
Part 2: Practical Preparation – get ahead of your upcoming “busy season” to set yourself up for success.
Part 3: Manageable Mayhem – navigate the chaos while you’re in it by working effectively and making it manageable.
Part 4: Sustainable Self-Care – explore routines and mindsets that are affirming and supportive, but do-able during a busy season.
Part 5: Rest and Recovery – “ride the wave” and recover quickly from wipe-outs when you have to keep swimming.
Admittedly, each part is (or was at one point) a bit long for the subject matter. (Still learning how to write over here!) So over time, I’ll link some shorter posts under the relevant sections above and throughout the guide.
I hope you’ll try something new, take what helps, and leave what doesn’t as you resolve to stay resilient and creative in your busiest seasons – even in the face of burnout!
Wishing you health, focus, boundaries, and so much joyful creativity.
For all of my fellow bean counters out there: may your debits and credits be in balance, and may your beans always be magical!
