Content Fatigue and How to Avoid It

Tactile tips to help your team create their best content

You’ve heard of corporate burnout in the lens of working past midnight and fielding calls from angry clients and only slightly happier managers. These stories paint a picture of burnout as the consequence of a massive fire burning all of your time and patience. But there’s a different type of burnout too.

Have you ever worked normal hours, doing an average amount of work, but struggled to get through the day? You’ll sit at a computer with a blank doc open– just banging your head onto the empty page, praying to squeeze some coherent thought out?

Content fatigue is a type of burnout. The relentless pressure to always be creating a new piece, crafting a new story, and spinning up original ideas. The content calendar deadline always looms.

The social media algorithms grant the highest rewards to those who can produce the most and convince their followers to spend greater time on the platform. The truth is that creating meaningful content is creative work that can’t be rushed.

How to Avoid Content Fatigue

Step 0: Get your team (or yourself!) on the same page

If your team is responsible for producing content regularly, make sure you are all on the same page. It’s okay to be tracking metrics like click throughs, but make sure your content values are aligned. Consider the following questions:

• Who does our content serve?
• What do we want to help them do or learn?
• On our team, who likes making which types of content?

Creating content should feel thrilling, not boring. People should be working on the content that they are most passionate about. Not everyone is going to feel the same way about live events vs writing or tutorials vs thought leadership.

Step 1: Create a content brainstorming dump

Have a collaborative space where everyone can dump ideas. To keep it productive, I suggest using the following format:

• Title (“Content Fatigue and How to Avoid It”)
• Tagline (“Tactile tips to help your team create their best content”)
• Medium (“Company blog, Twitter, LinkedIn”)

If your idea is more fleshed out, link a first draft or any assets you want to include. In my experience, if you don’t have enough to write the title and tagline, then it’s too nascent to even be in the brainstorming stage. This should be a place where anyone can free themselves from creative blocks.

Step 2: Don’t force yourself to create a specific number of original pieces

The name of the game is consistency. Your team will likely have to publish more often than you can create original content. Instead of forcing yourself to create original content at the cadence platforms demand, consider repurposing and resurfacing existing content.

If you’re creating meaningful, helpful content, then you should consistently publish it. Platforms often feel like “here today, gone tomorrow”. That doesn’t mean that your content is no longer interesting or helpful, but it does affect the number of people who will see it. If you repurpose your content, more people will see it. It’s not going to annoy people who have already seen it. In fact, it can be a good reminder that you have created an excellent resource for them.

By meeting the consistency requirement though repurposed content, you can free your calendar to focus on the creative work of original content.