I recently had the pleasure of joining Tom Evslin’s entrepreneurship feed network.

It’s been great to get my words out to a wider audience, and to meet and learn from new entrepreneurs.

Just now, however, I ran into a dilemma. One of the articles I read about cited this LifeDev post about how to avoid burnout.

It’s a great post which really rings true for me–I am one of those entrepreneurs who always has too many things going on–and I wanted to blog about it.

But then I thought, “Wait, this will be totally redundant for the readers of the feed network.”

Of course, dear reader, I decided to blog about it anyways, since my first priority is to my subscribers, but it does point out some of the unintended consequences of feed networks. The larger the network, the harder it becomes to be the first one to link to exciting new content.

Will feed networks begin to cramp the style of the bloggers who belong to them?

I don’t know about the other network members, but I’ve decided to damn the torpedos and plow onwards writing whatever the hell I feel like. And if I feel like linking to jokey, homoerotic Star Trek humor, I’ll darn well do it.

So speaking of burnout….

What LifeDev suggests is making a list of your activities and figuring out which ones are the “tank fillers” that increase your energy, and which are the “tank emptiers” that make you feel like Mel Gibson after a dozen shots of Scotch and a highball of Vicodin.

When things get busy, the tendency is to dump the “frivolous” tank fillers like exercise, eating right, and wasting your time watching videos of Richard Simmons on Who’s Line Is It Anyways.

Bad idea. If you strip the joy out of your life, you’ll burn through your energy reserves and crash.

The right approach is to keep your tank fillers sacred and delegate or dump your tank emptiers. Your homework assignment tonight is to do at least one thing that fills your tank!