The tactics creators rely on to maintain life balance

Becoming a creator often means turning your passion into your job. But that blurred line between work and personal life can have downsides, and without a balanced schedule, some creators find their ventures unsustainable.

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Creators are often in the privileged position of making their life’s passion and interests their job. But blurring the lines between work and personal life also has its downsides. Absent a balanced schedule with time for a variety of life priorities, some creators find their ventures difficult to sustain. In this case study, five creators share insights about how they structure their work to ensure that they strike a life balance that makes their ventures viable.

Key takeaways include:

• Define your work hours and treat time off as sacred. Eliminate switching costs by blocking off time for specific kinds of work. Be sure to set aside time for deep work or creative projects so they are not interrupted by emails and meetings.
• Set up accountability mechanisms, whether regular check-ins with a group, time-tracking tools, or self-assigned deadlines to ensure you stay on top of work and accomplish prioritized tasks.
• Outsource using online tools and by hiring help where possible. Automate as much as possible to free up time for the tasks that require your attention.
• Build in breaks. Find ways to rest and recharge. Recognize the signs of burnout and act early to prevent it.

In 2020, Alex Kantrowitz quit his job as senior technology reporter at BuzzFeed, a gig that had landed him citations in the New York Times and appearances on CNN to launch a Substack newsletter. Big Technology aimed to cover the world’s biggest tech companies and quickly amassed a following of more than 70,000 subscribers.

The following year, Kantrowitz let the newsletter go dark.

“It was just this massive run of work that no human should do,” he told The Fine Print about his decision to halt production. He has since resumed publishing the weekly newsletter as well as a companion podcast. “I don’t have any regrets…but I just needed a break.”

Kantrowitz is hardly alone in his feeling that running a solo journalism venture is too much work for one person to sustain. In fact, that sentiment is the norm. Across the world of newsletters, podcasts and YouTube channels, most ventures do not make it past the initial year before creators decide they are unsustainable. According to Amplifi Media, 47% of podcasts are abandoned after three episodes.

Creators abandon projects for a variety of reasons: a lack of financial viability, competing projects, health challenges or other personal reasons. The challenge of finding work-life balance is a common concern.

Nicholas Quah, who created and sold Hot Pod News to Vox, has talked openly about the burnout he felt publishing the newsletter in the months before it was acquired.

“The exhaustion began to set in….Every newsletter is a grind,” he told David Chen on the podcast Culturally Relevant. “I had begun to develop toxic feelings about the solo entrepreneur.”

In Vanity Fair, Quah admitted he came close to “burning it into the ground.”

For most people, work-life balance is dictated by outside factors: the nature of their job, their company’s culture, their boss, or their industry. Creators are in a privileged position of being able to define how and when they work, but they can also run the risk of taking on too much or working themselves too hard.

Balance is deeply personal. What works for one person may not be ideal for the next. Indeed, some of the creators we interviewed say they’re comfortable operating in an extremely busy, high-stress environment.

“I don’t burn out often, but I do run at the red line pretty frequently. To me, that’s kind of optimal,” said Jay Clouse, who hosts the Creative Elements podcast and publishes the Creator Science newsletter. He works 50 to 60 hours each week and doesn’t mind it. “I just raised my overall tolerance of stress.”

Others express a desire to reshape their work to fit more ideal hours, and many have started outsourcing or automating tasks as a way of making their ventures sustainable as they grow.

They agree that it’s easy to overburden yourself and to do everything on your own — from adding metrics to a spreadsheet after each post to replying in-depth to complaint emails — abandoning efficiency and ignoring the opportunity cost of such menial work.

This case study highlights the techniques and approaches that have worked best for these creators, as well as resources for shaping your own ideal work-life balance.

When it comes to setting boundaries around work, Hanna Raskin has a pretty rigid plan. She begins working on her weekly newsletter, The Food Section, at 8 a.m., after exercising, and doesn’t take a break until her husband prepares her a drink at 7 p.m. That’s when the work day ends.

“It’s always been important for me to have a drink at the end of the day. I’m not going to work if I’ve had a drink, so it’s a cutoff,” Raskin says. “It doesn’t have to be a martini, but it’s important to have a cue.”

She likens the habit to how Fred Rogers would change his sweater and shoes every episode on his children’s show, “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” — a way to signal a shift from one mode to another.

When Raskin is on the road reporting on stories about food and drink in the American South, she gives herself over to the reporting and maintains flexibility should things change. When she is spending the day writing an article, she devotes herself exclusively to that task.

“Even if I have a 15-minute follow up at 4:00, I’m distracted at 9 a.m.,” she says, noting how a looming meeting can distract from the focus she needs to write effectively.

Raskin also ensures that work doesn’t stress her out on weekends by making sure that the next week’s newsletters are ready to go before she wraps up on Friday evening.

“That’s the most important thing. I never go into a weekend thinking, ‘Monday is going to be crazy,’ because everything is under control.”

She plans out her fun, too, such as registering for a disc golf tournament or playing bridge with her husband. She can’t easily back out without disappointing others, so she sticks to the plan.

“It sounds rigid, but you have to plan your life as much as your work and make sure that you create that time, and that you’re responsible to someone else,” she says.

Not all creators have such a defined workflow. Clouse blocks off mornings for creative work and doesn’t schedule meetings on Mondays or Fridays as a way of ensuring he gets the time he needs for deep work and creative projects.

“What I realized I need to do is reduce my switching costs as much as I can. I do a lot of different types of work, and they require different types of energies,” he said.

The system works, but can overload Tuesdays and Thursday afternoons, when he stacks up his calls including podcast interviews, meetings with his accountant, and live community chats.

“I view that as a necessary evil so that I can maintain so much open creative time,” he said.

Sometimes after a really intense Tuesday or Thursday, he just wants to take it easy the next day rather than use his open day for deep work.

“I have to flex the willpower and discipline, and I have to give myself grace that I’m a human who doesn’t need to be productive every day,” he said.

Leveraging technology and hiring help are instrumental in freeing up time for creators. Jenny Bhatt, an author and the publisher of two newsletters — the weekly Desi Books and We Are All Translators — serve primarily as “modes of learning” for her, but she has hired students to work on them.

Hiring help can come with its own challenges, such as when students move on to a new project or their priorities shift. Bhatt is also a big believer in availing technology to make her workflow more efficient.

Bhatt’s personal tech stack includes:

She is always considering new ways that technology can help. Recently, Bhatt installed an app that blocks social media and email notifications so she can focus for stretches of time.

“One thing I’ve found as I’ve gotten older is that too much project switching in a single day can be exhausting, so I try to have set days for certain things,” Bhatt says.

For example, on Mondays, she focuses on the writing workshops she teaches. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are reserved for her translation and writing work. Thursdays and Fridays are for newsletters, and she uses the weekends to catch up on emails and prep for classes. Every weeknight 9:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. is “sacred reading time,” which Bhatt says even her husband knows not to disturb.

Bhatt has an engineering background. She says her years in the corporate world have shaped her working style and ethic. So she tracks how long tasks take and spends time to address inefficiencies. She has a customized project planning and prioritization system that essentially boils down to elevating the work that pays the bills.

“This means saying no to things that offer only ‘exposure,’” she says. “As much as possible, I create reusable templates to save time. I use technology wherever I can to streamline processes.”

Outsourcing is often an important way for creators to free up their time, but it can feel daunting and difficult. Outsourcing includes leveraging technology and people to complete tasks. The former can sometimes be an easier place to start.

Clouse utilizes scheduling software, SavvyCal, and Zapier and Notion to manage his workload and set aside uninterrupted time.

He has used Upwork to hire help in the past, and he currently has a video editor and audio engineer assisting him on a part-time basis. Job listing forums such as Journalism Jobs and Study Hall can be useful places to determine rates for such roles.

Clouse says outsourcing those tasks has “helped because that’s taken some of the creative work off my plate.”

Raskin used Fiverr to find a designer to lay out the quarterly print curation of her newsletter, which she drops off at local restaurants as a promotion tool. It was easy for her to outsource that task, she says, because, “The work has no personality. It just needs to be accurate.”

Other tools she has found helpful include Canva, which she uses nearly daily for social media posts and illustrations, and Beautiful.ai, which she uses to design charts and graphs for data-driven stories.

Find people for tasks you can outsource on Upwork, Fiverr, bulletin boards for audio editors such as Transom, Discord and Slack networking platforms for creators such as Planet Splice and Study Hall.

One of the hardest parts of being a creator is learning how to turn work off and take a break. Too often, creators end up spending their free time reading or listening to podcasts about topics they cover or answering emails.

That works at times for Namrata Bhingarde, who publishes the monthly Marathi-language podcast Stree Lok to discuss menstrual hygiene and women’s health. She says she is inspired whenever she listens to another podcast. She gains ideas for approaches she can try. At other times, however, she knows she needs to do something completely different and will read an unrelated novel or watch a movie.

Bhingarde tries to keep her weekends work-free so she can spend time with family and de-stress. What’s toughest for her is a day when life gets in the way of planned work.

“Some days, I feel really low. I feel like I’m not doing anything,” she admits. In those cases, she tries to focus on being productive when she is able to work again.

Long walks, meditation and yoga are among the tools Bhingarde relies on to re-energize. Those are also often cited by other creators. Jane Ratcliffe, publisher of the weekly newsletter Beyond, says that long walks with her dog, gardening and boxing help re-energize her.

“What I’m doing is very doable and very pleasurable,” Ratcliffe says of her newsletter, which she launched five months ago.

A writer and teacher, Ratcliffe took the fall semester off to focus exclusively on growing her newsletter, but she isn’t sure she will be able to sustain that. “If this does become something I can make a living off, then I feel like I have found a good balance. If it doesn’t, I’ll have to go back to the teaching, and then it’s going to be quite a hustle to keep all of this going,” she says, adding, “I feel like I’m in this possibly unsustainable situation.”

That uncertainty can bring on its own levels of stress to manage. Bhingarde says that she experienced burnout early on, when she was trying to build her own product while continuing to do her full-time job.

“I wasn’t actually giving full justice to both of them,” she says. “A point came when I messed up everything with my regular job, and I realized I can’t do this anymore.”

When that moment hit, Bhingarde decided to take a two-month break to reflect on what was next for her. It helped her realize what she hoped to accomplish with Stree Lok and how she could structure the venture to be sustainable. Now that she has committed to the idea and feels driven by a mission to help women and girls, she says, “There’s no chance of me telling myself this is not worth doing.”

“For the first time, I feel like I’m doing real journalism,” she says. “For the past 10 years, I was just doing a job.”

For creators, sometimes the act of creating in a different medium can be both relaxing and regenerative. Ratcliffe gardens as a way of relaxing and recharging. Clouse finds journaling to be helpful as a way of understanding and overcoming roadblocks.

When Bhingarde feels stuck on a task and isn’t sure how to proceed, she recognizes that staring at the laptop doesn’t help her get anywhere.

Instead, she’ll pick up her sitar and play music. Not only does it help her relax, but her incremental progress in learning the musical instrument has helped her feel that she can succeed — a feeling that carries over into her podcast work.

“Creation has its own magic. It helps you get out the stress. When I go back to the problem, I’d probably solve it,” she said. “The touch of the string, the music, it generates — it gives you a feeling that something believes in you.”

Creators have to be able to know their capacity and set realistic expectations for what they can do on their own. For some, that means curating some content to balance out their workload. For others, it means building a team that can help with the process.

Ratcliffe has structured her newsletter so that she publishes an interview every other week. This work takes the most time of all her tasks, an estimated 10 to 12 hours per interview. On the off weeks, a guest contributor shares writing, photography or art, and those posts become a lighter lift for Ratcliffe.

One challenge for Ratcliffe is the time of day that she is able to work. Due to health challenges and other personal responsibilities, she can only really work on the newsletter after dinner. She doesn’t take weekends off either, but she doesn’t mind that as much.

With her newsletters, Bhatt keeps a running log of curated topics and links that would be interesting to include so she doesn’t ever get stuck when drafting her newsletter. “I’m personally primed to go and don’t have to stare at an empty screen,” she says.

Because she isn’t focused on generating income from her newsletter, Bhatt finds the biggest challenge is ensuring she can manage it without taking time away from her other projects.

“To be allowed into someone’s email inbox is a privilege these days. I won’t abuse that privilege. I want them to get value from what I send,” she says.

Whether it’s a formal tool such as the Eisenhower Matrix or a simple to-do list, visuals can be a key way to determine what tasks to tackle first, what to delegate and what to stop doing to make better use of your time.

Here’s how Bhingarde uses a whiteboard to lay out tasks for the week ahead:

Burnout is so common for creators who find their life out of balance, but there are usually signs leading up to it that can help you recognize what’s happening and intervene. There are three symptoms that characterize it, Monique Valcour writes at Harvard Business Review:

• Exhaustion: Feeling of physical, mental and emotional fatigue that makes it difficult to work effectively or feel good about your work. If you’re suddenly unsure why you embarked on your venture or finding yourself questioning its value, it may be a sign that you are on the verge of burnout.
• Cynicism: Disengagement from your work, colleagues, projects and collaborators. You may feel negative and detached, like you have lost a sense of joy or pride in the work, or you may feel like “burning it down,” as many creators have attested.
• Inefficiency: Feelings of unproductivity, lack of achievement or that your skills are slipping. It’s normal to feel unsure when working in such a nascent and developing space, but when you feel down about your ability to achieve, it might be time to consider whether you have set unrealistic expectations of yourself.

Beat burnout by taking self care seriously, especially as it relates to sleep, nutrition, exercise, socializing and health, Valcour advises. And don’t feel like you have to tackle it alone. “Find coaches and mentors who can help identify and activate positive relationships and learning opportunities,” Valcour writes, noting that the best antidote to burnout “is seeking out rich interpersonal interactions and continual personal and professional development.”

Many creators lean on friends, colleagues and family to help hold them accountable for accomplishing goals and maintaining work-life balance. Ratcliffe has an accountability group she formed with two other newsletter publishers whom she met during a program for Substack creators. They send each other accountability emails listing a goal at the start of each week. Every Friday, they follow up to say whether they met it.

Ratcliffe also meets with that group every month on Zoom to troubleshoot problems they’re facing. Recently, the group helped her set up an affiliate program for books she recommended through her newsletter. It also serves as a way for her to prioritize audience growth strategies and tackle them one by one.

“This has been incredibly helpful,” she says. “Without that, you had this flood of things you want to do to improve your newsletter. But what we all decided to do is just pick one thing a week, so that it felt doable.”

Accountability can come in the form of self-appointed deadlines, too. Bhatt says she organizes her time with daily, weekly and monthly to-do lists and sets a deadline for every project.

“It doesn’t mean I hit every deadline but at least I know what’s on my plate at any given time and what needs to be moved when something new comes along,” she says.

For Raskin, readers provide accountability. She counts on them to let her know when she isn’t delivering on what she has promised. She returns the favor by letting them know when she needs to build in time off. For example, she took the entire month of July off and was able to do so because she let readers know in advance that her newsletter would publish 11 months out of the year.

Many of the creators also focus on holding themselves accountable for ensuring work-life balance in the lives of the people they hire. By avoiding emails on weekends or evenings, and by keeping work focused on deadlines, they can take the pressure off others to be available at all hours to respond to Slack messages and emails.

“As long as they’re delivering on a deadline, I leave them alone,” Clouse says. As a result, he adds, “I’ve had almost no churn in support staff in the past five years.”

Setbacks are a part of life for creators. Whether it’s a rejection or a failed initiative, a setback can derail productivity and demotivate. How do you work through it, rather than giving into the feeling that you should quit?

Ratcliffe says she has learned it’s better to deal with the disappointment instead of distracting oneself. She might stomp around or dance to music to let the negative feelings out, or she will talk to herself and acknowledge the disappointment. It may be a slow road to recover, and that’s okay too.

“I’m old enough now that I know something that feels so raw and painful when the news first arrives will feel a little bit better tomorrow and a little bit better the next day,” she says.

Bhatt adds that it helps to evaluate whether you are looking for validation externally rather than from within.

“The only kind of emotional energy that’s sustainable is the kind that comes from within. The energy that comes from external validation can’t last because such validation is fickle, trend-focused, and doesn’t always appreciate the aspects of your work that mean the most to you,” she says.

Additional Resources

• “Work-life balance is a cycle, not an achievement,” Harvard Business Review, 1/29/21
• “Simon says… Work-life balance,” Deloitte, 7/15/22

This is one of six case studies — launched by J+, the professional development arm of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY — that aims to provide journalism creators building their own newsletters, podcasts, and other niche projects with in-depth analyses of what works and what doesn’t in the journalism creator ecosystem. This case study was supported by funding from the Meta Journalism Project and was written by Ambreen Ali, an Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program alumna.