The curse of the modern world is a busy life. Most of us are switched on 24/7 – or at least, it feels that way. Thanks to smart phones, we are answering emails and messages well into what should be our downtime. It becomes so easy just to think “I’ll deal with this now” without realizing that you’re eating into time you should be spending on yourself.
Webcam performers often have two separate lives – the IRL life, perhaps with a day job, often with families to look after, maybe school; and the online cam life, which is equally real and includes everything from editing, uploading, maintaining social media and websites and more. Regardless of how you balance these lives, finding a balance can be difficult and it all adds up to increasingly depleted time off.
So, how do we manage such busy lives? Here are some coping strategies for making sure you don’t lose touch with how to relax, at least not entirely.
Scheduling
Keeping a rigid schedule doesn’t sound like much fun, but when you’re working for yourself the lines between on and off tend to blur. It’s easy to find you’re always working. The most straightforward solution: Make sure you have scheduled time set aside for various key activities. The things that come with this can be a godsend.
Schedule weekly slots for camming, performing, editing and uploading. When the time is up, you are done.
Same goes for social media. It’s a fantastic way to touch base with your fans and audience, but social media never switches off – so you need to set boundaries. Allow yourself an hour a day to update social media… or two hours, or fifteen minutes — whatever! Figure out your correct amount of time, and that’s it. When the time is up, you are done. If you find your notifications demand your attention around the clock, mute them.
During the day set aside time to answer work-related emails. Don’t be tempted to dip in and out of this all day as its distracting. Admin and accounting can usually be done in one slot. A good idea is to do this at the end of the weekend or on Mondays when you have all your incomings for the previous week. Also, you guessed it: When the time is up, you are done.
Scheduling goes for leisure time too. Make sure you schedule yourself days off. Yes, that’s right — actual days with no work. This is so important for your mental health and wellbeing in general. Whether you spend this at the park with your family or binging Netflix on the sofa, you will feel better for it. You should aim for at least two days off a week. Try to make sure that sometimes this is a full weekend even. It’s good for the soul.
Apps are Your Friend
A great way to manage social media is to utilize apps. There are a few on the market to make busy lives less stressful. If you run your own site, use a plugin to autocycle your content and archive to your social media.
Buffer can be a major help to keep your feeds fresh and full of content. It’s easy to upload a schedule list of links to your site, and it will auto-post to your designated platform, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
If you are utilizing a lot of platforms, another way to short cut is to use IFTTT, which literally stands for If This, Then That. This clever app contains lots of time saving pre-made widgets, plus the capability to make your own.
The premise behind IFTTT is you can instruct the widget to react to a certain action. For example, “if posting #KatyCams on Twitter, then share the content of the tweet to Facebook, Tumblr etc.” It can even send your Instagram pictures to your other social platforms. Apps like this can save precious hours in admin and content sharing.
You got this! ? #bufferchat – Bonnie pic.twitter.com/oL3rdjoX7P
— Buffer (@buffer) January 17, 2018
Get your Priorities in Order
Prioritizing your workload helps you to make the most of your time. The easiest and most classic way to do this is to create a to do list. Make it weekly, monthly or both if it helps. As tasks arrive, write them on the list. If you’re juggling two different lives separately, to do lists can help manage this. For example, have a separate list for Cam, Day Job and Household. Crossing off tasks will give you great satisfaction, as well as structured goals to aim for. Be realistic though. You are only human, so don’t be afraid to say “no” if you can’t manage everything.
Keep a diary for appointments. Most of us have this function on our phones, yet few of us use it. If you add deadlines, appointments and your schedule into your phone’s calendar, you can set it to prompt you with reminders.
Your Phone is Your Friend
Use the tyrant in your pocket to help manage that busy life. If you utilize it properly, your phone can be your P.A. Just remember to schedule regular back up syncs as nothing is more heartbreaking than losing everything in a phone crash.
When you take time off set an “out of office” message on your email account. This is even more important when on vacation. Emails are the permanent link to our working life. Make sure you aren’t tempted to clock back on by the ping of your phone. An “off hours”/”out of office” message is a professional and polite way of saying I’m on my time now.
Webcamming often means being our own boss, and that’s great — but burnout can creep up on us if we don’t stay mindful. Make 2018 the year you start to make the most of your time.
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Katy Seymour is a super-sex-positive writer in the U.K. who believes kink is life. Email her at katy@ynotcam.com.
Image via Pascal THAUVIN.
Great article! 🙂
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