Feeling overwhelmed. We’ve all been there, right? If there is a small sounding ‘no’ in the virtual room, we got you, because when it does happen, you’ll have the tools to beat it. Recently we have been having team meetings discussing the wide variety of opportunities working across continents can offer as well as the negatives, if they are not looked after.
A popular name kept cropping up when we discussed the reason for employees feeling overwhelmed with their colleagues or managers – Brené Brown. Bréne is the author of ‘Daring Greatly’, a book about becoming resilient to shame. We won’t spoil too much, because it will be up to you to do the work. However, a lot of the basis for people not admitting to emotional turns, or feeling overwhelmed or being burnt out, is shame. Shame for the fact that they can’t manage the workload, shame they had to take some time off for childcare, shame that they just need some time off for mindset reset. When you become vulnerable and talk about your shame you’ll realize that we are all human and you may be surprised how your colleagues and management react.
That’s why at Evoke we have open channels to communicate with anyone in the team, as soon as the word overwhelm or tired is mentioned. BOOM. That’s the time to recenter and have a bit of R&R. Work gets divided up, meetings get postponed and no one is made to feel vulnerable. After all, you spend most of your time talking to your colleagues so why not spend that time connecting, as well.
Don’t succumb to ‘overwhelm’
Overwhelm can stem from many areas of work and personal life, when working in the social media/marketing arena (this industry does not have to be inclusive of the Social platforms like, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tik Tok, Snap Chat, WhatsApp, Clubhouse), but will and often does include areas such as newsletters, adverts, podcasts, event organizing, email marketing, and a lot of digital creation. The implications of the amount of time to digest all of this just to complete a task can be detrimental to many people, researching for hours, seeing urgent news bulletins, creating collateral describing and mentioning disastrous events, even to scrolling past negative statements, status’s and social media whilst looking for something else.
With social media and marketing being one of the fastest growing sectors the only way forward is up, and with technology moving as fast as it is with the innovations over the last few years the risk of higher rates of burnout, and mental health set backs is a factor we can’t ignore. With that in mind we have a few nuggets of advice for coping with overwhelm.
When it comes to your work, within marketing and social media, there is one huge item you can’t ignore:TAKE A BREAK. We can’t tell you how significant this is. If that’s a skate around the neighbourhood, or a tea and a good book, or even stopping work for the day, ensuring you let your colleagues know if your’e struggling.
PLANNING, yes planning. We all know it has to be done so why not – JUST DO IT – Nike got it right with this slogan – the key to most things are action. Plan your content, divide up work where need be, ask for writers, content marketers and graphic artists to step in, to build a full proof plan and strategy. There is no shame in reaching out. After all, social media marketing covers so many expertise, dropping the ball would be NOT asking those expertise to step in. Planning will be the beginning of your roadmap to your strategy ensuring you plan time for time off!
IMAGINATION. Where in any industry would imagination be a tip to overcoming overwhelm or burnout?! A great marketer uses their imagination and any avenue of exploration they can to create content. Create a blog, make a video, write that epic piece of content you have stored in your creation vault. Create something amazing, put your mark on it. Diving into your imagination and taking time out that way is always a go-to tool for many of the team here at Evoke.
The last tip goes out to the SMEs, especially if you deal with social media on a large scale basis. SCHEDULING. Using scheduling tools for your non curated content can be a powerful tool in your arsenal to overcoming overwhelm. Be careful not to schedule too much, and post your curated content as much as you can natively on the platform as it shows your clients that you care and will take the time to post at that time yourself. This is why for an SME, you might not have the resources to post as often as you would like and might have to outsource your content posting or use a scheduler to offset the native posting.
ALARMS. Now this might seem like a rather loud way to guide you into overcoming overwhelm, yet, it’s a useful tool to have a notification, even silently letting you know you have a meeting, or that item of work needs to be in, or even telling you to go and do some CRM. Set hourly, weekly, and monthly alarms to keep you up to date with what’s happening ensuring you can get yourself right back to step one of PLANNING.
And there you have it, this is by all means not the full scope of overcoming overwhelm, however it does pave the way for you to come up with your own tips, tricks and hacks.
Keep an eye out for more musings on how to shift our mindset over the most vital aspects of our work and lives. If you think this was useful, why not share it around – you never know who needs to read it right now.
Evoke International.
