fluffy rambles: Planning time

Planning time

July 19, 2022 10:42 PM (a year ago)

I’ve been streaming on twitch again lately, but right now it’s kind of unstructured. A thing I’ve noticed a lot of folks I follow do is they set up a regular streaming schedule, where they allocate specific hours of the day to stream, and specific days of the week for specific games. It seems to work really well for them.

I’m wondering if I should do that sort of thing, especially since I’m having trouble staying focused on the specific games I’m playing, and I’d also like to build up things like having vtuber activities and the like.

I also feel like this sort of thing would make it easier for me to give my day structure, and maybe I could also use it as a means to get myself in the groove of always working on music/games/etc. at certain times as well.

If I were to do this, would people watch? And what times of day work well? So far I’ve been doing my casual streaming in the evening but my evenings tend to be where things are the most up in the air, what with dinner and my various evening meetup groups and such. I’m thinking I’d probably do my streaming blocks in the early afternoon, like 2-4 PM Pacific or thereabouts. Or maybe gaming blocks in the afternoon, and music blocks in the morning. Maybe just as something folks could have on in the background when they’re working? I dunno.

Twitch seems to consider 25 hours per month to be the minimum for a “professional streamer.” Not that I’m interested in that, of course, but it seems like a good rule of thumb for what to consider as a scheduling thing goes. Streaming games for 2 hours per day, four days a week is 34 hours per month on average, and that feels like a reasonable starting point and would leave me plenty of time for doing plenty of other creative work (both on- and off-stream).

If I were to do this sort of thing, I’d probably start out with a gaming schedule where the current games I’m doing each get a day of the week, like right now it might be:

Mondays: Control
Tuesdays: Moss
Wednesdays: Rhythm/fitness gaming
Thursdays: Backlog (Steam, itch.io, random console games, etc.)

and then maybe at other times of the day I’d potentially stream creative stuff (drawing, game dev, music making) or cooking or whatever.

Anyway. Just some random thoughts. I wonder whether streamers who do this professionally set out to do it this way or if it’s just a rhythm that they fall into.

I just know that if I don’t have a schedule for things, I tend to lose track of time and end up doing nothing at all, or at least feeling like I’m doing nothing at all.