Bottom line, there are only 24 hours in a day. It’s up to you to balance your time between stuff that’s necessary - work, sleep, chores, self care, time with family and friends - and stuff you want to do, like personal projects. You say you’re “pumping out as much work as possible” and that’s probably too much! It’s really important to give yourself rest time, for your own well being and health, and also for your creativity. Design work that’s done under stress or without good rest usually isn’t our best, and if you’re putting a lot of pressure on yourself to keep churning out work, you’re probably not doing the best work you’re capable of. Taking some time off, counterintuitively, can make your design work better. Pick a couple evenings a week and say you’re not allowed to do design work, you have to relax. Relaxing is a priority, and the only way to conquer burnout.

But I want to address the “pumping out as much work as possible” part of your letter. Reading between the lines, it sounds like you’ve decided personal projects are the solution to your lack of formal education, and for the fact that you don’t have a lot of work from your current job to put in your portfolio. I want to assure you that many designers come to work in this field without formal design education. I know people with degrees in science, math, and history, who decided to pivot to design or advertising later. They didn’t go back to school, they put together a portfolio to show what they were capable of and that got their foot in the door. Working as a designer is very much about how good your skills are, but it doesn’t really matter where or how you learned those skills.

The more experienced you are, the less your education is a factor when you’re applying for jobs. School is just a starting point. Once you’re a couple years in, your professional experience matters more than your education because it’s a much more recent example of your abilities.

Personal projects are great for exploring things you can’t with your job, and can be an asset to a portfolio to show more breadth in your experience and skills. But you don’t need to overdo it: a couple of your best projects are better than a dozen mediocre ones. Quality over quantity is key. If you’re pushing yourself to do design work every night, is that going to be the best example of what you’re capable of? Are you really able to think about your personal style and approach if you’re burnt out?

I suggest taking a moment to pause and think about what you want next. You want to leave your current job, so think about what kind of work you’d like to do instead and do some research into jobs and designers who do this work now. Then figure out what gaps exist between you now and the designer you want to be, and just focus on a couple of those things at a time. Creating simple goals for yourself and choosing one or two things you can do to get yourself there is a much gentler way of working towards your goals than constantly pushing yourself to create every day.

Take the focus off social media too - you don’t need to go viral to get another job. If anything, I find the dynamics of social media are a distraction, and really irrelevant to your career. Don’t let likes and views distract you, they’re not a measure of how good your work is and you don’t need them to prove yourself. The social media beast will always ask to be fed - you can ignore it.

You don’t have to be the best designer you can possibly be to move on to the next stage of your career, you just need to be the designer your next job needs. Becoming a better designer is a slow process, you evolve over years as you have different experiences. You can’t rush yourself there by working in the evenings. Do personal projects because you truly want to, or because they’re specifically helping you reach a specific goal. If you’re feeling burnt out, then those projects are probably hurting you more than helping, and it’s okay to stop.