In December 2017 Ruby Glaskin (independent theatre producer for Milk Presents) made an inspired move to gather together a great bunch of like-minded theatre/performance folk whom she knew had a keen interest in the wellbeing of artists. Award winning theatre producer Luke Emery was there. He said loads of ace stuff and his energy in the room was grounded, curious and proactive. Soon after he wrote a brilliant blog post called "5 STEPS FOR AVOIDING BURNOUT".
I recommend that you go straight to the horses mouth and read it for yourself here. But if time is short, here's a brief overview to get you thinking for today. He introduces it with these wise and humble words:
"Burnout is all too often accepted as a necessary evil of working in the arts. As something we all HAVE to endure. Essentially, I’m on a bit of a mission to try and interrupt the work-all-the-time mentality that seems to pervade a lot of what we do in the arts. I’ve done a couple of workshops on my own experiences. I make it a focus of my producing workshops. It's about interrupting something Lou Platt (Artist Wellbeing Practitioner) and I call the "mantra of martyrdom". [...] Here's 5 techniques that I've been using for the last 2 years."
Luke's five tips are as follows :
Delete your emails from your phone. Your Facebook. Your Twitter. Turn off notifications
Make a separate login for your computer
Define your own working time
Make a separate space for where you work
Practice the art of saying no. And learn where your limits are
Luke elaborates on all of the above points and I recommend you check out his thoughts by visiting his web-page www.lukeemery.co.uk/wellbeing