As a freelance writer, you have to balance being productive with getting burned out. But how do you walk that fine line?

How can you avoid burnout as a freelance writer? Figure out how many hours or words you can sustainably write in a day, and don’t overdo it. Diversifying your work and rewarding yourself will make it so you’re less likely to burn out. You can also increase your rate so you need to do less writing to earn the same amount, and work with less demanding clients.

In this article, I’ll explain how you can avoid burnout as a freelance writer.

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Why Managing and Avoiding Burnout Is Important For Freelancers

As a writer or any kind of freelancer, there’s only so much that you can give in a day.

Maybe that’s a certain number of hours that you can sit at your keyboard, or a certain number of words that you’re able to write per day.

Whatever it is, if you push yourself to hard, you might put yourself out of commission for weeks. So it’s important to pace yourself and learn what your limits are as a freelancer.

Slow and steady wins the race. Remember that you’re probably going to have to maintain your current schedule and workload for decades, so you might as well make a more sustainable plan for your work now. Instead of getting burned out and having to adjust afterward.

How Much Can You Write Per Day Without Getting Burned Out?

Everybody will have different tolerances for how much they’re able to work and write in any given day. It may also vary from day to day if you suffer from health issues, depression, or anything else that impacts how you’re able to work.

I outlined some general guidelines in my How Many Words Can You Write Per Day? article for beginner, intermediate, and advanced writers. You can check that out for more details.

For me personally, I can work for about 4 hours before my productivity starts to take a hit. In that time I can usually write about 4,000 or 5,000 words per day.

That’s about my comfortable upper limit. Although I would feel even better only writing 2,000 or 3,000 words per day!

If I absolutely have to, I can write for about 8 hours per day and crank out 8,000 words or so. But I can only really maintain that for a week or so if I have a lot to get done for a tight deadline, and usually my wrists and hands will be sore and I’ll need a break for a few days afterward.

Don’t forget that aside from writing, there’s other stuff you need to do to keep your business going. You need to create and send out invoices, correspond with clients and respond to emails, do revisions, and other stuff that eats up more of your time too. I find setting a limit for yourself of 4 hours of writing time per day gives room to let you do these extra tasks as well.

Being busy doesn’t have to mean getting burned out! Read my article How To Start Writing With A Busy Schedule or Full-time Job for more information.

Strategies To Avoid Burnout

Aside from limiting how much work you do in a day, there are some other things you can do to help prevent yourself from burning out as a freelance writer.

Start Early In The Day

For me, I’m most productive if I wake up and get straight to work.

The earlier I wake up, the more productive I am.

So when I really need to get a lot done, I know that I need to wake up at 5 or 6 am.

For me, getting as much done in the least amount of time possible really means waking up early. But you need to find out when you’re most productive and works best for you.

Maybe you’re a night person and aren’t ready to write until the sun goes down. And then you can write a ton of work between 8 pm and 2 am.

Reward Yourself

Whenever you finish a big task or hit a milestone on a project, I think it’s good to reward yourself.

This motivates you while you’re working on something, and it also gives you a chance to unwind a bit after the task is done.

I like to write in the morning and then reward my self by having lunch only once my work is done. But you might mix up your day by throwing in some snacks, or taking an hour off to play video games or watch your favorite show for a bit.

Switch It Up!

Unless you’re a robot, it gets extra tiring to write about the same topic for 20 articles in a row.

You can only write so many articles comparing different vacuum cleaners against each other before the words start to lose all meaning.

That’s when you need to take a break for a bit and work on something else. Write some posts for your own blog, or work on pieces for other clients that aren’t on the same topic.

You should also make some time for your own side projects, like writing a book or something else that you work on at least once a week.

Basically, change is your friend when it comes to avoiding burnout. So try to diversify your writing as much as possible. That way you won’t be writing about the same thing for two weeks straight, which is enough to drive anyone insane.

Increase Your Rates

If you’ve been writing for a while, it’s probably time to increase your rates. As a general rule, I’d try to bump your rates up by at least one or two cents each year.

That way you’ll be able to earn the same amount of money (or even more) while doing less work.

Think about it. If you’re writing for 2 cents per word, it will take you 5,000 words to earn $100. Meanwhile if you can increase your rate to 5 cents per word, you’ll only have to write 2,000 words! That’s less than half the amount of work to earn $100 per day.

There are a few ways that you can go about increasing your rates.

You can make a blanket increase that affects all of your current clients. You email them to let them know your rate has increased. The risk is that some of them may not be able to afford your new rate, and may stop working with you. I don’t recommend this, especially if you have one or two main clients that provide most of your work.

A better option is to set your new rate as the minimum that you’ll accept for any new jobs. For example, maybe you currently charge $0.08 per word. But from now on, you’ll reject any jobs where you won’t make at least $0.10 per word.

It can be hard to be strict with yourself on this, but you’ll thank yourself in the long run. Otherwise you’ll always be settling for low-paying jobs and working for less than you’re worth.

Learn to write faster by checking out my article How To Write A Blog Post or Article FAST!

Get Less Demanding Clients

Part of what can lead to burnout is having really demanding clients.

Do you have a client that doesn’t respect boundaries and is expecting you to respond or work in the evenings or on weekends? Drop them and find someone more reasonable to work with.

The same goes with clients who want you to write out outlines for pieces before you start working on them, without getting paid extra to make the outline. Or clients that constantly want you to do multiple revisions on every single piece that you submit to them.

You have to take all of that extra work you’re doing for them into account. If you work it out, your actual hourly rate that you’re earning is probably much lower than you think. And then it might not actually be worthwhile to write for them at all.

Consider Starting A Content Agency

If you constantly have more work than you’re able to do yourself, it may be time to consider expanding your business.

Instead of turning clients away, you may choose to hire one or two beginner freelancers to work below you.

The freelancers who work below you do the actual writing, and you can pay them a fair rate. Maybe 75% of the total amount that the client is paying you. Then you can pocket the remaining 25% for finding the client and work for them, handling communication with the client, and proofreading or editing their work.

I will warn you that in the beginning, this will actually result in a big increase to your workload initially. Which is a big reason why I haven’t ever taken this step myself. You’ll have to train your writers to write the way you want and meet your standards. And quality freelance writers are actually surprisingly hard to find.

Outsource Non-Writing Tasks

Instead of paying other people to write for you, you might hire them to do some non-writing tasks for you instead.

For a busy freelance writer, hours of your week might be spend communicating with clients and scheduling things, as well as doing bookkeeping and other more trivial admin tasks that you could train someone else to do.

Virtual assistants can help you with a lot of the menial stuff in your business for a reasonable fee. Then you can focus on what you’re best at, the writing!

As long as you’re making more per hour than it costs to pay your assistant, it makes sense to outsource the work in my opinion.

Learn To Say No

As a freelance writer, you can get into a bad habit of not being able to turn down work.

You probably remember times when you were just getting started. Clients were hard to find, and you may have gone weeks or months between projects.

So whenever work does come along, you may feel like you don’t have any other choice but to take it.

But if you’re running a successful freelance business and have more work than you can handle, it’s okay to just say no.

It’s your business and you can do what you want. Drop your lowest paying client, or that one that’s a pain and always has lots of extra requests. Or just say no to new work if you are happy with what you’ve got.

Basically, just don’t be afraid to cut back if you need to.

Conclusion

It’s better to maintain a steady and manageable amount of work for your freelance writing business.

Trying to do too much can cause you to get burned out. Then you may have to take days or weeks off to recover before you’re able to write again. Either because of repetitive strain injury, or just being mentally fed up with writing for a while.

I recommend that most writers try to limit themselves to about four hours of actual writing per day, and maybe one or two hours of other admin tasks.

Diversifying your work, rewarding yourself, working with less demanding clients, increasing your rates, or bringing in outside help are all ways that you can make things easier for yourself.