profile

Marketing Design Dispatch

How much are you carrying right now?

Published over 1 year ago • 3 min read

Hey Reader,

This week I’m sharing some thoughts on rest & recovery with you, as well as some fun stats and survey data (I’m not the only one who finds charts and survey results genuinely enjoyable, right?)

When rest just makes you realise how tired you were

In the last issue I let you know that I was kicking off my month-long sabbatical from work with a week of total rest. No side projects. No content creation. Just relaxing and recharging.

It was a great week filled with reading, sunshine, sleep, and even a boujee hotel staycation.

A shot of the view, where you can see the beach in the distance
My POV: Laying by the pool in the sunshine with a cocktail next to me

But as my self-imposed week of rest was coming to an end I realised something: I’m still tired as f**k.

Damn.

Turns out the burnout I was feeling in the lead-up to this sabbatical ran much deeper than I thought.

I’m going to be honest with you: my first reaction upon realising this was one of disappointment. I was disappointed that I’d need to forego some of my other sabbatical plans to allow more time to recover, but mostly I was disappointed in myself for letting it get to this stage. For not noticing earlier.

This burnout crept up on me, with one stressor layered on top of another — from the world, from work, from life — slowly but surely adding a little weight at a time so that I didn’t notice just how much I was carrying around until I put it all down.

I’m grateful that I have a solid remote work routine that I know protected me from reaching a breaking point, and that I have two more weeks off to continue recovering. I’ve been embracing the freedom of this sabbatical to create when I feel motivated to and rest when I feel drawn to, and honestly it is a lovely way to be living!

How much stress are you carrying right now? As you stop to notice it, is it more than you expected?

I hope you can schedule time to put it all down sometime soon. Though I know that’s easier said than done.

While I wish I could tie this up in a bow with some recovery advice for you, I’m not there yet. And if you aren’t either then I hope what you take away from this is that it’s okay to be disappointed about needing to slow down, or maybe even a little mad at all the factors that put you in this place. Rest isn’t as fun when it’s something your mind and body are mandating, is it! But you have to do it anyway.

Sometimes it’s only when you stop that you notice how fast you were moving before.


Dispatch sponsor

The Stack Overflow developer survey results are live!

Over 70,000 developers shared their thoughts on work, technology and tools in the 2022 Stack Overflow developer survey and you can check out the results right here.

It’s filled with useful data and visualisations, like this one below which compares median annual salary data to years of experience by role type, and gives a great overview of the state of the dev community (which includes anyone who writes code!).

In many places the data is split by professional developers and those learning to code, so you can see what tools and tech your peers are paying attention to and how they’re learning and levelling up.

As a designer who codes, I filled out the survey myself and was verryyy interested to see what the results for the question “How favorable do you feel towards blockchain, crypto and decentralization?” would be. You can click here to jump straight to those results if that’s something you’re curious about too, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I’m not as alone as I thought in feeling less-than-thrilled about its prevalence in the industry right now 😅

Take a scroll through the results yourself to learn lots of useful things about the state of the dev community!

And if you want to hear more of my thoughts on the results, check out my latest vlog.


How do Dispatch readers feel about designing social media assets?

Speaking of surveys and results, here’s a look at how y’all responded to my question in issue 62 about designing social media assets.

Shout out to the 27.3% of you who really enjoy this type of work. The industry needs more of you quite honestly!

I feel like I may have jinxed myself with making this the topic of that issue, because shortly after it went out (read it here if you missed it) I found myself needing to dive headfirst into designing social assets for blog content when we were unexpectedly low on design resource 🤦🏻‍♀️ It was good for me to do so though, as it helped me spot a few areas where our process could be improved. And it confirmed that yep, I still find no enjoyment in that side of marketing design work 😅


My relaxing activity for the rest of today: planting some new lavender plants in pots on my terrace and hoping these ones will stay alive. The heat of the Spanish sunshine is no joke y’all! But I’m doing my bit for the city bees.

Hope you have a good week and that you get the rest you need,

Charli's handwritten signature

Marketing Design Dispatch

by Charli Marie

Join 17,000+ creatives receiving insider insights about brand and marketing design – featuring landing page and rebrand breakdowns, useful career content, and a behind-the-scenes look at running a Brand Studio team in tech.

Share this page