Less than 15 minutes after my Patron Livestream on Sunday morning, I was throwing up. A few of my family members had been battling a stomach virus for the past week, and it seems like it finally caught up with me as well. I'm feeling better now, but I'm still trying to be kind to myself, and not put my body through too much.
I slept for most of Sunday, and then on Monday morning I was generally feeling better - but then I spent a couple hours putting the finishing touches on a video, and after that I was totally drained. The work wasn't taxing (although it was certainly tedious), and yet it was still enough to wipe me out for a good chunk of the day.
Thankfully, one of my major goals for this month has been to rebuild the content buffer, specifically so I don't have to suffer any interruptions to my workflow when stuff like this happens. I'm making progress on that goal - for most of the month, I've been roughly a week ahead of schedule (although I might lose some of that buffer this week, I can make my peace with that given the circumstances). And being able to work in advance means a big load off of my mind.
There are so many things I want to do in addition to my videos. For a long time, I've been talking about doing more livestreaming, I need to get back to making D&D content for my $3 Patrons, and of course I'm woefully behind on the #Dungeon23 challenge - but I think a lot of those will be a lot easier for me to add to my schedule once I've hit my goal of having a two-month buffer.
I don't think I'll hit the goal by the end of March, but my goal by the end of April is to have all of my videos filmed and edited through the month of June. Especially since I'm not currently working a day job, this seems like something that might actually be achievable.
Of course, there's another lesson I learned from this incident - I need to pace myself. For the past two weeks, I have barely taken my foot off of the gas pedal, trying to write, shoot, and edit three or four videos per week. It's exhausting (and I really can't wait for the day when I can afford to hire an editor and take some of this work off of my plate), but I know the end goal will be worth it.
But I also need to appreciate the buffer I do have, and take advantage of it. There have been some nights where I've stayed up until 1am or 2am trying to finish a video edit, just so I could have it done as soon as possible. And when I do that, can I really be surprised that I got sick so easily?
Hell, I'm not even certain I got the same stomach virus as the rest of my family - the symptoms are different enough that this might just have been something I did to myself by overreaching for the past two weeks.
And honestly, none of this even touches on all the housework my wife wants me to help with, and how stressful those projects can be as they wind up taking more mental and physical energy than anticipated. And I need to make sure I'm allowing enough time in a day to work on those in addition to my YouTube content, so we can get rid of some of the mountains of clutter in our living room while our kitchen is gutted.
So, going forward, I'm still planning on trying to get three scripts done this week, and hopefully I'll film one of them this week as well. But even if I don't do more than three videos scripted, filmed, or edited per week, that will still give me a chance to build up the buffer - even if it just happens a bit more slowly than I might hope.