Hello, friends!

I hope you are having a good summer thus far. It has been a heck of a hot one in southern NH. Don't even get me started on this humidity. Blech! 

Our meeting today went swimmingly, and I was so glad to see faces of folks I've met and folks I had not yet! It's fantastic to get to know our New England compatriots and see the wisdom, experience, and joy we all experience in our work. 

We had a discussion about burnout during the meeting today and talked about tools that can help us offload some of the tasks out of our brain. Things like text expanders (I use BeefText which is an open source one), macros, tools like Notion (which I use as my business nerve center) and other such means to take some of the admin tasks out of our brains and put them into other places to allow us the opportunity to focus on what we do best: editing. 

There were also discussions about separating work time and free time and how to do that. Setting defined hours, having a dedicated office space, and not allowing yourself to fall into the trap of always needing to be productive. Even if we love our jobs, we need time that isn't on the clock to allow our minds to rest and rejuvenate. 

It was a very productive, positive discussion, and I am so glad we had the opportunity to talk about it! Burnout is a thing we are all prone to, and with the world being so precarious lately, there is a lot of extra pressure for many of us. There's no shame in dealing with it; it's something we all experience from time to time. When we're in that space, we sometimes feel isolated and entirely without support and need others to step in and say, "No, you aren't alone." 

I am looking at doing our meetings on the third Thursday of the month every month at noon, and I'll be setting up the event for next month very shortly. The theme for next month's discussion is going to be how to address sensitivity discussions with authors. There was also a request for some instruction on how to utilize text expanders to their full potential, so I will see if I can hunt down a speaker for that! I think I know who I am going to ask first. 

Thank you to everyone who joined us this month! If you have burnout suggestions you'd like to add to the conversation, please share them in the comments on the blog. I am considering putting together a resource for folks that includes things like various text expanders and other tools, though there is also an excellent list of those in Erin Brenner's book, The Chicago Guide for Freelance Editors. (Which I will talk about until the end of time.)

Talk to you all soon! 

(Bonus photo of my parrot, Daisy. She had many opinions during the meeting.)