Today I wanted to talk about a bunch of things, including university, distractions, efficiency, and time management when it comes to Blogging, Streaming, etc.
So, I’ve been streaming quite regularly over the last couple of weeks and have been really enjoying it. Sadly, though, I’ve got to take the weekend off and focus on some university stuff as well as family time. My mom’s birthday is this weekend, so I’m visiting my parents until Sunday. That’s one of the reasons why I limited the times I left the house in the last two weeks to the utmost minimum required… Just in case, y’know? The quick covid test I did the other day revealed that I don’t have it right now (praise the test station next to the dorm) and that I’m not asymptomatic. That’s good. I won’t put my parents at risk and since my father and my sister will pick me up later today, I won’t have any chance to catch it somewhere on my way there. The same thing goes for my way back on Sunday. It’s all safe and honestly, it’s something that I really needed. With the recent events over here and us getting put back into a harder lockdown with an actual curfew (again), I’d like to take the chance to visit my family and spend some time there while I have the chance and time to. University just started, so stuff’s rather slow at the moment. I doubt that I’ll have the time to visit them after this week until August… and even then, I’ll have my exams in August until the end of the semester and I’ll have to deal with all kinds of other things… Honestly, it’s a pain in the arse and I’m looking forward to the end of university. For starters, like in every semester, I’ll have mostly online classes meaning that every professor gives you tons of homework because you’ll have to make up for the time that they waste in their zoom-meetings due to “technical difficulties” aka them not finding the screen share button or them not connecting their tablet properly. I know it’s not their fault… This situation only has been going on for a year… but I feel like it’s a bit unreasonable to just dump everything onto the students and to then pretend that it’s fair to do so. After all, reading essentially a whole book every week isn’t really the problem, understanding it is. Pair that with written homework, writing assignments, and all the philosophy classes I have on top of that that consist of reading and understanding stuff… It’s a lot of work and the workload increased a whole bunch compared to the previous semesters.
So that’s just me venting about not really having too much free time and yet I’m here also blogging daily and streaming on a lot of days. Well, I’ve been at it for a while and just like with blogging, you’ll have to stay consistent in streaming. With Blog Posts, releasing one every few weeks would be plentiful already for Google to show your posts online. I mean, I get a lot of hits as of late because I stay relevant every day. Understandably, I want to keep at it, and yet I’ve got to cheat now and actually back-schedule this post here to keep the streak and post again tonight to have a post up for today. I’m sorry. I don’t wanna cheat but I just passed out last night. So, uh, why am I doing this? Well, mostly, since streaming and blogging really are my only two creative outlets. I don’t have much free time so I’d like to do something like this more and more consistently. I want to keep at it and basically finish a post a day and stream three to four times a week and improve my English skills by writing and talking a lot in English. After all, I study English Studies, y’know? And I’m aiming to teach it, too, so there’s that, too. Overall, I like getting my work done for the day and then finishing up a post in the evening before heading to bed and it works so far… but yesterday, I was just exhausted. And with morning streams I basically have a similar thing that I can do to start off the day “productively” – I mean, I provide a space where people can distract themselves from the events in the outer world. Be it the never-ending pandemic or the never-ending police brutality in the States, it can be quite taxing on one’s mentality if you’ve got to deal with that all the time. Heck, I hate the newsticker on my phone that I can’t seem to turn off that notifies on the latest covid numbers and new measures, curfews, etc. It fucks with my head, frankly. It’s annoying and I feel like mental health topics should be talked about more often and that they should be taken seriously. So, my stream, The Crypt, is basically a place where you can lay your worries and anxieties to rest and enjoy your time without having to fear toxicity or bigotry and where everyone can have some nice chats and a chill time and listen to good music and watch me fail at games or fail at applying that gradient in Art streams and all of that. It’s basically me relaxing and essentially sharing it with others so they can relax as well. I think that stuff like that is needed, too. I’m happy if people enjoy the streams and while the numbers have been great as of late, I wouldn’t say that I care a whole lot. We just recently hit 500 followers on Twitch and I couldn’t be happier but in the end, as long as I get to provide a safe space like that and as long as I get to make new friends, I’m more than happy with how the stream is going. But I won’t be able to stream this weekend and that’s kind of annoying because I won’t stay relevant in a way, just like how breaks hurt your numbers on WordPress or any other blogging site. Hence, I’ll be happy to return to streaming on Monday… hopefully with a bit more time for that.
The issue here is, however, that I just pointed out that I have little to no time to take care of myself while also having to juggle important things like chores and university on top of having the blog and the stream going on as well…. which is why time management comes into place. Since the beginning of the stream, I’ve mostly been posting stuff on the same day that I’ve written it up… that’s something I want to change. I want to have “one in the can” and I want to have that security of potentially being able to take a day off and focus on other things while still having a scheduled post. On top of that, it would be lovely if I could have at least one review every week coming up if not even two reviews per week, despite them taking more time than my usual posts… This is why I need to manage my time more and become more efficient.
Hence, I’ve recently started using ClickUp, which is a cool website that lets you organise your tasks and displays them in a lot of ways. I have yet to figure out the best way of doing things on there but I plan on splitting up posts into multiple tasks and completing them over several days. Essentially, that will mean that I won’t edit posts after two hours but instead, I’ll edit them the next day. On Monday, I’d post a review, then I’d work on two separate posts. Tuesday, I’d write up a new review, post the one prepared on the day before and edit the other post. Wednesday, I’d edit the new review, post the post prepared on Tuesday, write up a new post. I think that splitting it up like that could increase the quality of the different posts. Similarly, it might take a load off my shoulders… I’ll have to experiment a bit with all of that but I’ll post on it again and maybe even “review” ClickUp as a whole. I’ve been using it for my university stuff since the beginning of the week and honestly, it’s really good at displaying stuff that needs to be done as a list, with tasks, subtasks, etc. You can assign statuses like “completed” and “work in progress” to it and move it over from category to category… and similarly if I increase my efficiency like this a bit more, I could maybe finally get to those interviews I had planned for YouTube.
As you can see I have a lot of things going on and plans for the future and my goal with ClickUp is to essentially manage my time better, create certain time windows for different aspects of blogging, create fixed times for streaming, and have a lot more control over my streaming hours and my university hours. The goal overall is to free up a day and be able to take care of me without getting overwhelmed by all the things I still have to do. Keeping track of the tasks, staying efficient at what I have to do, using tags to sort through things, assigning priorities, etc. – I feel like it could help me a lot to deal with this “burden” that I’m feeling right now. After all, priorities are important: University/Mental Health > Chores > Blogging/Streaming… but I still want to make everything work and because of that I just need to have the time management in control and set boundaries, set time windows and priorities to everything.
So, this post here is technically yesterday’s post… I mean, you’ll see it as “today’s post” but it’s actually a post written on Friday that got scheduled back to Thursday because I literally passed out from exhaustion yesterday after ten hours of university with little to no breaks between it due to professors going for 2-hour classes instead of 1.5 hours and because the next professor will just start the class even if you’re in another, and then I didn’t have time to eat at all or go for fresh air or anything and afterwards my head felt like it was exploding. -> Bad Time-Management on my end.
Uh, so I’ll prepare a post for Friday and write up posts as usual for Saturday and Sunday. I’ll have to go to the doctor’s on Tuesday so I won’t stream then but I will for sure on Monday. I’ll then have to deal with the university classes and all the tasks left to do this weekend but being in a different environment aka my hometown should maybe help with my mental health and this weird headspace that I’ve been in over the last few days. Once all of that’s done, I’ll probably start this new time management schedule thingy… and I’ll have to see how it works out for me.
To sum it all up, the point of this post was to say: Hey, I’ll try this new thing and it will definitely help me out because I need better time management. It will also improve blog posts probably. It will also make studying and streaming and blogging at the same time a lot easier. That’s all.
Cheers!
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!
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