Not every week I get days off, less often I have two and even less often I have a day off where I don’t need to go somewhere, meet someone or do something. Summer at home is full of birthdays, friends, and family gatherings, so I do try to take a couple of days off regularly, but feels like after some days off I need another one to actually rest, but nope. When I will be in Armenia this autumn I will cut the amount of days off a lot and get some streaming marathons going too, so less IRL activities, but not a lot of free time still.
That is all fine though, the problem is that no matter days off or not I feel like I’m always out of time, always running, always catching up, always behind on schedule. Past few years it got pretty bad and started to affect me mentally I feel, or maybe it’s other way around, something affecting my mental state negatively caused this time anomaly in my life. Plenty of stuff going on for past years to negatively affect my mental state, both IRL and with streaming, so no surprise. On the other hand, I’m consistent with my streams for over 8 years, doing over 40 hours on average per week and I guess any person working regular 9-to-5 is not expected to be productive in their free time.
Unfortunately self-employment, gig economy and other endeavors don’t care about that and you need to be productive as much as possible if you want to stay afloat and want to grow as a creative or freelancer. Only getting worse now with growing number of platforms you need to cover, massive influence of algorithms where even people specifically following you might not see your content, because algo gods decided they know better what people want to see. So it’s not just something in my head, it’s something that is affecting your growth as a content creator, which in turn affects your income and your life directly. In “classic” employment growth mostly means increase in salary, so being content with where you are and what you have is fine, but in content creation growth is required to stay where you are. If you stop growing you start falling off, it’s a complicated topic that deserves its own post, so I’ll return to it in detail.
It’s really impressive to see some people managing to do so much stuff, especially some content creators, like what am I doing wrong not being able to be that productive? Seeing people not knowing what to do with their free time or just enjoying doing nothing, man my brain sometimes imagines how great it would be to just sit, relax and enjoy some views. Then when I try I never can, because same brain starts racing with all the thoughts and feeling bad about “wasting time” and not being productive. I do feel like social media and modern standards of life ruined us with all the sigma grindset and other concepts, but unfortunately in some fields it’s actually a requirement to have a shot at succeeding.
Can’t be only me struggling though, another negative of the social media is that everyone is flexing the success, but struggles and failures are always hidden. Can start feeling like there’s something wrong with you, since everyone is doing good, but it’s not just you and it’s quite common. Still, really impressive how some people manage to be so productive and manage their time so well, I want to do that too, kinda need even to return to growth, to secure decent future.
Planning to get some time management going and improve some multitasking and repurposing of content, to decrease the time investments in all the different platforms. Gonna be a long fight, because I have no time for all this! Perfectionism, anxiety, and other bosses sure spice this playthrough up too.
On the positive side trying to find some rational answer to the lack of time – I do have a lot of games to showcase nowadays, lots of contacts with developers, publishers, and marketing agencies. In general gaming industry is massive and there are constantly lots of bangers and I have the luxury to play so many of them as a part of my job for free. I guess you are expected to be short on time with all this.
A little bit of a rant post, but maybe someone will see some familiar issues and can just feel a little better that they are not alone, maybe someone can share some experience or advice how to handle it. At least if you hear me complaining about the lack of time you know it’s not some excuse to not play some game, but it is actually real and I wish it wasn’t.