Last week, I completed the 30 day post challenge where I made a short term goal to post 30 consecutive days while working a full time job at 60 hours a week and too many hobbies to keep track of. Here is what I did and realized:

finding time to write is like looking for a needle in a haystack

Whether you are trying to go to the gym or run your personal errands, finding the time to focus on writing is probably the most difficult part of being an active steemit contributor.

There's only a small chunk of time available for many of us who have regular 9-5 jobs and work OT to bring in extra income. For most people, the bulk of your free time is likely to be concentrated around the commute to and from work. I've read statistics indicating that the average commute time for Americans is 1 hour. This free time assumes you don't drive to work too, but you can always use a voice recorder while you drive to get ideas down.

Outside of that, you also have your lunch time, and whatever amount of free time you can commit once your home, which for some might be zero due to family commitments.

If we start crunching the concept of daily posting here, we're talking about a significant portion of your life that revolves around just writing on steemit. This doesn't even include doing your everyday normal life hobbies just so you have something to write about.

Reader question!
how do you get to work, how long does it take?

what I do to try and write everyday

I ended up hitting all 4 of those free time slots to write (commuting to and from, lunch, and after I get home from work). Of those 4, the bulk of my writing occurs during my train commute to and from work. Lunch and home is where I review it and clean it up. Somewhere in between all of that is when I'll post and promote it somehow.

There will be times when posting is impractical or impossible and trying to post everyday will end up with a crappyily editied post or something simple such as a photo with a few sentences talking about what's going on in the photos. I did this when I had 2 weekends where I was racing dirtbikes since there is a lot of prep work to get everything together for a race and a lot of clean up after riding is done.

the result of all this hard work

As much work as it was to post daily, I enjoyed every minute of it. I increased my follower count from 78 to 330+, but it wasn't long before I was mentally worn out and started stealing time from anywhere I could get it. If I could give up happy hour with coworkers and spend that time working on a Steemit post, you bet your ass I was taking that hour for myself more than half the time. Eventually I started losing sleep to keep up, and the quality of my content went down the gutter as I struggled to find time and the mental capacity to string together more than 4 words together.

But I love sharing an idea and I love connecting with the readers here. So how can I change what I'm doing and focus more on steem?

1. Work less?

This is a tough decision! If you get paid OT, it's guaranteed steady income, while steemit might be a bust for each article, especially when you are just starting out.

Giving up your OT, if you even get it, also means being passed up for promotion against the coworker who works every night busting his chops to crunch out work.

This was especially difficult to do when SBD and STEEM were roughly 1usd. Working 20 hours of overtime a week paid more than working on STEEM blogging for 80 hours a week as a minnow trying to gain an audience. The reality is though, that it is probably still far easier to gather an audience and develop your skill now than it will be in the future.

But the value of steem and sbd have gone up considerably so you have to ask, which is more rewarding to you and how much effort are you trying to put into this?

I think creating content will eventually become part of your routine and the cumulative effect of all your hardwork will pay off in both the real world and on the steem blockchain. You will become a better writer and be better overall, in communicating.

2. find a different job

This one is great if you don't have a career that you are trying to build your life around. If you've invested thousands of dollars on your education, and hours of your life trying to perfect this craft, then it will be hard to give up a primary source of income. Some people will find this challenge an exciting new way to look at life, others will find this idea terrible.

But it really depends on where you see you're self in the future because if you don't have a career and just work for money (and it's likely not a lot of money to begin with) , you might be able to find a job with a bit more freedom so you can create Content.

If your jobless then I don't know why you aren't posting on steemit on a daily basis. You're going to eventually run out of random things to talk about.

This means you'll have no choice but to learn something new, or excel at what you already know. Both of which will teach you immensely valuable skills if you stay with it.

3. post less, interact more

The last way to become a better steemit is to litterally post less and spend more time creating the experience that you want to share. This would include just simply commenting on other posts. This gives you more time to fine tune your work and more time to develop how you want to present your content.

The reason why this is better, is because there's a scarcity ofgood online content on the steem blockchain, and I think it largely stems from the fact that the good creators don't post for numbers, but rather post when they are ready to share their idea. But it takes time to nurture that idea to a deliverable content, and even more effort to connect with other steemians who will read it.

Strangely the most popular posters then to be those who post frequently, but these steemians have put in their fair share of work to get where they are now.

what am I going to do?

I'm going to cut back my ot hours and reduce my posting frequency. Both of these, I hope, will give me back some time for myself and help me focus on my content and how I deliver it.

I think this is the most beneficial path for most people because their day job is their primary income. I want to keep saving and take a leave of absence from work to focus on creating steemit content for a few months. And by content what I really mean, is to create a theme and focus for all my blogs

Have you posted daily?
What issues did you run into?
How are you planning on tackling steemit?

#Photo of the day!

I had the chance to meet with 78 year old man who owns an old masonry/wood building. He is a retired wood worker and while going through his structural framing I noticed an old finger jointing machine!

This machine cuts a finger joint into 2 pieces of wood so you can create nice joint that looks like this:

Reproduced from Gifkins