More than a month of non-stop streaming, almost 280 hours of streaming in a month, so more than 9 hours on average with no day offs and honestly, it’s not even something insane, but the problem is finding time to do something else. Not even like IRL things like hanging out with friends etc (even though I even managed to fit some of that in my schedule too), but also things related to streaming, like setting some things up, writing on this blog and so on. It’s not like I really need to write on my blog as a part of my streamer’s “career”, or I can’t live without a YT channel, or something else – nah, it’s no problems, but it’s something you need to do just for the sense of accomplishment. Same as with workout that sometimes was suffering a bit because of lack of free time.
Now I’m back to at least having a day off, so it already feels good to have a day when I can try to catch up with some stuff, what I’m doing right now for example. Hearing from people on my birthday that they like reading my stuff here just motivated me more and made me feel more wrong for lacking free time, which puts more emphasis on proper scheduling too, which I’m going to attempt and experiment with and I can share some current ideas and plans.
So first of all marathons like the one I just had will be quite rare, doing 10 hours streams with a couple of smaller ones here and there instead of proper day off is totally too much for everything else on my list. I planned to grind the month out and do some other productive things including posting on this blog, but ended up grinding only streams and having no time and energy for anything else. You wake up at 6am (everything in local time), 6.30 it’s bus time already, 30 minutes road, 1.5-2 hours of changing+sauna+swimming+sauna+showering+changing, 30 minutes road again and it’s time to start things up for the stream, need to hang things dry, make some coffee+breakfast too and you are already ending your intro for 10 hours of stream after which you have less 3 hours before bed where you need to make some food and then well chill a bit and wind down. I go swimming 4 times a week, so there are days when morning is more free, but then you also need some groceries, visit relatives from time to time, prepare notes for Our Games Show – things like this, not a lot of time left that way for other things. I’m also trying to go for walks quite a bit at least while weather allows when not swimming, so that’s also some time gone. Day off gives decent amount of time to just recharge and also do some of the things at least, like to write this blog post for example, even though I should do it earlier during the day and not closer to bed time tbh, but whatever, at least it’s being done. So no day off marathons I probably will leave for some rare occasions like for holidays in December for example and maybe not full month of that too, but there is also other factor that might make it more doable…
Not doing 10 hours during those marathons and maybe on regular days doing my classic 8 hours again at least on work days for example. Before marathons weren’t as taxing (even though I guess I wasn’t also trying to be consistent with blogging and other side things and that’s why I didn’t feel it last year?) and probably because I wasn’t going ham too much with hours outside of maybe Saturday stream, so might be worth switching to less hours streams when I remove day offs to have some of that free time. Another option I’m considering currently is to switch my work days schedule to 9am-5pm, aka 8 hours and then doing long weekend streams, because weekends we can hang out more and people are less busy. Also keeping 9am starts because it fits me quite well, I like that time frame and had way more success so far with it too I have to say – people don’t need to pick between my and Ela’s streams and have something to watch in the morning to start the day. Might move my day off to Thursday then, so I can do Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday 8 hours, then recharging and going longer Friday, Saturday, Sunday streams.
Will do some experimenting with all this, just like I did with taking a break in the evening and then returning – seemed like a good idea and many streamers do that, but in fact didn’t work well for me after trying, so gonna try my theories this time too. Probably in a couple of weeks, since there is a risk of getting under lockdown here again and if swimming/gym will get closed once more I’ll stick to 10 hours schedule more since I’ll have that morning free time and not too much to do anyway (started this schedule because of lockdown too, already more than half a year of long streams passed, didn’t even notice). But if no lockdown I’ll start experimenting with moving day off and cutting some hours, then we’ll see, most of all I’m afraid that cutting length and freeing time in the evening will just add hours to procrastinating and time in the evening won’t be too useful, but we’ll see about that, after all discipline is also something I need to work on, at least with streaming it’s on point for sure, happy about that. One of the wild options might even be sticking to 10 hour streams, but taking 2 day offs, that might actually be not too bad, or 1 day off and 1-2 shorter days that start a bit later to have more morning productive time.
Might be quite a lot of experimenting until I find super comfortable schedule, but one thing for sure – I’ll still be delivering a lot of stream hours regularly, that’s the main thing I’m building everything around, but just gonna try to make it more comfortable for me to do some other stuff, like writing here, being more 5Head with some streaming stuff and production, starting YT channel etc. Time is very valuable and useful essence, that I never really appreciated back in a day, just killing it with some dumb activities and complaining about abundance of that free time leading to boredom etc, do not repeat my mistakes, better start appreciating it earlier.
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