It’s in the name: With content creation, you’re always creating. So how do you manage that constant ask? How do you find ways to stay fresh and inventive, while also keeping the conveyor belt moving? It’s a difficult balance to strike, especially in a field where many creators work unconventional hours, and are sometimes called to work unexpectedly.
It can be easy to stagnate as a content creator due to mental burnout, which can stem from a variety of sources: Poor work-life balance, anxiety, disproportionate returns on investment of effort, and more. And sometimes, it’s all connected: You don’t see the returns you want, you over-work, your work-life balance suffers, and you become anxious.
How do you fight the stagnation that can become so damaging to your productivity, efficiency, and peace of mind? Here are a few ways you can address it.
5 Ways to Fight Content Stagnation
1) Assess Your Work-Life Balance and Identify Imbalance
It’s important that we start with some truths that might be obvious, but are nonetheless important to re-state: You are a person outside of your content and your production, and you are not defined by your content.
Every content creator has responsibilities, ambitions, and stresses outside of their work. It’s important to not lose yourself in work, take care of yourself, and nurture your personal life just as much as your professional life.
I’ll go one step further and say that, if your content is a direct reflection of you as a person, then you should prioritize your personal life, to ensure you’re at your best. If you have a work-life imbalance, take a step back, and take the necessary course of action to replenish your energy, so you can come back stronger, fresher, and at your best.
2) Determine if You’re Suffering from Bad Inertia in Your Work
Once you assess your work-life balance and take the necessary steps to return to 100%, the next step is to look at your workflow and determine if you’re suffering from bad inertia.
You may know inertia from the scientific principle: An object in motion tends to stay in motion. In the context of content creation, it is applied like this: Are you doing the same things over and over again? And is nothing changing? If you find yourself in this state of inertia, and your results aren’t changing, that could also be causing stagnation.
Now comes the part where you conduct a multi-tiered assessment of your work flow and its efficiency, starting with your brand itself. You first must introspect and proactively diagnose this state of bad inertia. Once you do that, you can make the necessary changes.
3) Re-Evaluate Your Brand Composition and Framework
We’ve established that, if you’re experiencing stagnation, you may be trying the same things over and over, with no change in the inputs or the results.
Causative factors could exist in your brand framework, your content, or your social media strategy. It’s up to you to explore that once you’re back to 100%. You should leave no stone unturned, because if you don’t make the necessary changes, you could just find yourself in the same spot down the road.
First, re-evaluate your brand composition and framework, and determine if there are any inbuilt constraints that are limiting your freedom, flexibility, or growth potential. Is your topic focus too narrow? Is your intra-platform presence too small? Does your brand image need more polish and development? Any answers you find will flow into the next phase of re-evaluation.
4) Re-evaluate Your Content and Social Media Strategy
Once you’ve re-evaluated your brand composition, you should now re-evaluate your content and social media strategy, with the same general queries in mind: Is there anything placing a constraint on your efficiency, reach, or growth potential?
Do you need to spend more time fleshing out your content ideas and enriching the analytical element of your work? Do you need to expand into another medium to build a larger audience, like video or audio? Do you need to spend more time fostering community and engaging on social media?
As long as you stay true to your brand image and framework, you can be creative in this phase. Think outside the box, and search for new ways to stimulate and play to the audience’s desire for human connection and informative, thought-provoking content.
5) Continue to Ask Yourself if You Can Do Things Differently
It’s easy to identify stagnation and the mental hurdles that come with it. It’s a lot harder to make the necessary changes to fight that stagnation. But this sobering truth remains: If you don’t do something differently, you often won’t see your situation change. You could still be stuck.
Even after you go through this cycle, keep asking yourself if there are things you can do differently – either to generate more return on investment for your effort and energy expended, or to reduce inbuilt constraints for your ideation, content creation, and community development.
The sports media industry is by no means easy. But sometimes, through habits, we can make it harder on ourselves. Give yourself and your process the dedicated focus and delicate attention it deserves. Through that care, you can nourish a more sustainable path.
Playbook
- Assess your work-life balance
- Determine the presence of bad inertia
- Re-evaluate your brand composition
- Re-evaluate your content and social strategy
- Continue to ask yourself if you can do things differently
