Addressing Agency Life Burnout
Agency life requires a lot of smiling. Smiling at your client when they tell you about their list of requirements, smiling at your coworkers to uplift morale when working on a big project, or smiling at your superiors when they ask you to take on another client.
It is said that faking a smile can make you happier and there’s actually research to back that up. But what happens when agency life burnout seems to slide the smile off your face no matter what you do? I’ll tell you about one thing you can embrace and one thing you can identify to make agency burnout a little less heavy.
Novelty & Knowledge
Novelty is secretly our greatest weapon and most silent downfall.
Many people in the advertising and public relations industries thoroughly enjoy agency life in their first years because of the curious hustle and bustle. However, as the years go on, many start to realize that clients request a lot of the same work done and it can become repetitive. Ad & PR professionals can experience creative burnout, feeling like they’ve ‘used up’ all of their best ideas on previous clients or that new clients will notice the same idea has been modified for them.
As time goes on, how do we maintain the fresh eyes we came in with?
By embracing novelty as our greatest weapon.
Novelty is what makes a new smell smell so good, new clothes feel so soft, and makes vacation feel like a whole new world. When novelty wears off, our emotions blend together, and daily activities feel like the same old same old. To address the burnout caused by agency life, we need to recognize that novelty is our greatest weapon. While it’s easy to get stuck in feeling like the work you produce is the same as for the last client, or two clients ago, trust me.
The other funny thing about novelty is that it brings you back to a fresh perspective. It doesn’t remind you about the knowledge you’ve already learned, and how it now feels like commonplace. For example, when you started PR you might not have known how tired the phrase “we’re happy to announce…” is, and now you wouldn’t even think of touching it.
We carry over new knowledge from client to client and don’t realize how desensitized we’ve become to knowledge we’ve already learned. By embracing the novelty of each new client and being purposeful about taking moments to acknowledge to ourselves what we’ve already learned, we are giving credit where it’s due. When we compare ourselves to our own work we are only hurting our future creativity.
Create Rest Boundaries
Along with some forced smiles, agency life can also make us say yes to things we don’t really want to say yes to for fear of letting the client down or not getting to the next step in our career.
Image sourced from Copperfield’s Books.
What we don’t realize is, when we say yes to work that we aren’t prepared to do, we are putting out a lot less quality work. In the book 24/6 by Tiffany Shlain, she tells her audience about the astonishing benefits of giving ourselves genuine rest. I know for myself, I feel guilty if I take time to rest or I feel stressed the whole time with a nagging feeling in the back of my head. I always feel like there’s ‘something I should be doing.’
In Shlain’s book, she takes one day a week to be completely free from technology to let her mind rest and reset. Now, I’m not asking you to do that by any means, but I am asking you to listen to what she noticed:
Her mind needs more time to repair than she realized, burning the midnight oil diminished her creativity over time and made her frustrated by her output.
After taking time away from tech to rest she had more creativity, and the novelty of her workplace returned.
She felt less over-stimulated and overwhelmed by her everyday tasks when she allowed her mind to reset, taking time away from the algorithms that are poised to suck all your attention is really rewarding.
It is important for us to not only identify when we are feeling tired, but also be wise enough to know not to ignore it. It might feel like if you stay up a little longer you’ll finish this one assignment/to-do but in reality, you’d feel a lot better if you listened to your body’s queues. Anger or frustration can be a signal that one of our boundaries have been crossed, if you feel angry or frustrated by the amount of work you have to do, you may have allowed work to encroach on your rest time, or even worse, you’ve done so repeatedly. When you identify where projects/to-do’s have made their way into your personal time, you can eliminate them to give your mind the proper rest it so dearly needs.
Final Words
If you fake a smile, it might actually make you happier, but if you identify and decrease work the times you feel most tired, you might just become happier on your own.
Agency life brings a lot of novelty, there will always be new client needs and a new initiative to unveil, take your learned knowledge and apply it to new clients without comparison.
Do these two things and agency life burnout will be a lot less depleting.
About Riley
Riley Sweet is a senior majoring in Advertising and Public Relations. This is her first year participating in GrandPR as she is looking to grow PR skills and practices. Her prior experience includes being part of the National Student Advertising Competition (NSAC) and interning for Grand Steel as 1/2 of their marketing team. After graduation she plans on navigating the professional world by job hunting for the best opportunity, whichever city/state that may be.