Update for February

So, I've finished my first full month of being a full-time content creator.  Some things I expected, other things I didn't.  So for those that are interested, this is more or less a story of what my life has become now.  For those not interested, skip down to the part about my upcoming episode on BASIC.

So my routine has pretty much been to get up at 6:30 in the morning and get ready, because I have to take my daughter to school.  Then I come home and eat breakfast.  Then I start answering emails.  I usually have about 20 or 30 of them in the mornings.  I used to do some of this when I was at work.   I think it's important to answer as many emails as I can, unless they are stupid stuff like "can I have a free laptop" or "please help me with this error message on my MacBook Pro."   Anything related to my actual channel or content I produce I try to answer.  

Next thing is to ship any soundtrack CDs that sold overnight.  At first there were 20 or 30 per day I would have to ship, which took a lot of time.  I would also have to make a special trip to the post office. But now that the initial rush is over, I'm only shipping perhaps 1 or 2 per day.  So I just stick those in the mailbox.   I would have never in a million years thought my job would include autographing things every day.

So by this point it is usually around 9:30am when I start actually working on video stuff.  And this is where things sort of caught me off guard.  I would start work and other than breaks for eating, I would often work until 9:30pm.   Granted, I used to do that anyway when I was working a regular job, but the difference is I wouldn't start work on video stuff until 6:00 or 7:00pm.   But now I was doing it all day.  I kept telling myself "Well, this is my job now."  And I felt especially pressured after 4 or 5 days had gone by and no video was uploaded.   After all, I had believed that if I quit my job that I could manage 2 videos per week.   However, that turned out not to be true.  

At first, I couldn't quite figure out why I couldn't make as much as I thought I could.  I think part of it turned out to be that I did more than I realized when I was at work.  I used to answer emails, write scripts, and do research on videos while at work.  Sure, I couldn't film anything or do any editing, but I could do a lot of it.  My job was a very relaxed job and I often had 2 or 3 hours of free time each day, so I tended to make use of that for my youtube channel.   So while I have gained more time for video production, it wasn't quite as much as I thought I would.

Several other creators that I'm friends with, some who are here supporting me on Patreon, such as Techmoan and LGR told me I should not burn myself out.  So after a couple of weeks of that, I pruposefully tried to slow down some.  I decided 7:00pm would be my cut-off time and I would spend the rest of the day either going out for a walk, jog, or even watching TV.   However, looking back at the month I think I did pretty well. I still managed to upload 6 episodes of The 8-Bit Guy and 2 episode of 8-Bit Keys during the month.  And it was a short month.  So really, that's 8 episodes total, even though some of those were in progress during January already.

So, I think I'm settled into a better routine now.  And I'm going to shoot for 5 or 6 episodes per month at this point.  

Speaking of... I'm working on a great episode right now on BASIC. It doesn't teach how to program in BASIC (That would be boring) but it talks about the proliferation of it, the history, and the impact it had.   I've been planning this for 4 or 5 months now.  It is going to feature 3 great guest stars, who have already filmed and submitted their parts.  I have Clint from LGR, Ben Heck, and Lim Leonard (co-creator of Mobygames).  This episode has sort of spiralled out of control.  There was absolutely so much content I wanted to cover that the script ended up being over an hour long.  So I had to cut and cut and cut some more.  Each time I cut something I was annoyed because I really wanted to cover all of these different aspects.   I am now down to about 30 minutes and the audio track is actually finished now.  I'm just filling in the video track with scenes I have to film.  However, I'm thinking about cutting it into two 15-minute episodes instead of one giant 30 minute.  How do you guys feel about that?