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I used to be a manager for a pair of companies over the course of the past decade, and one of the most-managerial things that you can do is employee schedules. It sucks. I was allotted 190 hours to run a store that was open 24-7… that breaks down to roughly 5-6 ‘full-time’ employees. Your overnight shift covers 40 hours of graveyard shifts, which leaves two days per week that someone else must work over night. If that person works 40 hours per week then they must in turn work two days that are not over night… which means you can’t work them the day after a graveyard shift (which is inherently their day off and well… that just kinda sucks for them). If you want something done around the store like cleaning or re-stocking that is near impossible for someone working alone, so you need times during the week where two people are both present and working. But 190 hours only gives you 32 hours of double coverage (there are 168 hours in a week). So you have to make the most of it. As a manager if you want weekends off you basically have to schedule 16 hours of that 32 on the weekends so that you can be off, which leaves only 16 hours during the week to cover things like stocking, cleaning, organizing, putting up new posters and advertisements, repricing products… and this in no way accounts for that guy who called in or quit yesterday.
That is a lot of math that is involved in simply making sure that there is someone present to work. Remember that time you were sitting in Algebra II and someone asked ‘when are we ever going to use this in real life?’ Well guess what… now is that time.
Because as much as this was a huge thorn in my side the past ten years it is also a skill that I never let go and in fact I use it quite often on my own YouTube channel. I’ll save you the absolute mess that is my life (especially this year) but believe me… my personal life is equally as horrific and cluttered and confusing as anybody else in this forum. The balancing act that is a 10-year home remodel, a wife who is literally crazy, a pandemic, a ten-year old daughter who collects hobbies, working these inflexible managerial jobs and living over an hour away from the place that my YouTube channel is based around makes it exceedingly difficult to manage a channel.
But I managed to do so for five years and nearly 300 videos now, and I am going to share with you the things that made this possible. It was rough; it was not easy and if you are looking for a magic solution you are in the wrong field. There is nothing easy about YouTube. You will need to learn to adapt your life to it. You will need to get help. And hopefully you were listening in that Algebra II class because that is going to come in handy.
Schedule a Break
Yup… my content schedule revolves around the times when I will not be posting. YouTube views historically drop off during the holidays, especially for amazingly-decent family fishing channels. So that’s a nice perk. I take off December/January every year because… well what’s the point? My audience needs a break, I need a break, the fishing sucks and nobody is watching YouTube anyway. Better to let the laundry air out and then start anew when things begin to make their way back in February and March. I’ll film a few videos specifically for my audience, but I make no requirements on myself to get that done.
I Make Seasonal Content
I break up my content by seasons. Every year is a new season of family fishing content. There is value in this because it allows me to have multiple playlists and it allows new viewers to go back and see our growth. It also allows us to celebrate things… instead of just constantly dumping content on YouTube we can now prepare and generate excitement for a whole new upcoming season. It gives us a chance to create a fervor over new content. In addition to this creating content on a seasonal basis allows us to tie videos together. Every winter we come up with a goal for the year, and every video needs to have some tie to that goal. This creates a story-arch that covers 20-25 videos and encourages viewers to watch them all; if you want to blow up on YouTube finding ways of getting viewers to watch multiple videos is one of the things you must master. This year I intend to double-down on this by including tie-ins like ‘this is what happened in our last video’ and ‘this is what is happening in the next video’ sections to further encourage viewers to keep watching.
Plan By The Week
The most important aspect of scheduling your content is how it fits in to your life. Where do you find the time to film, edit, do your metadata research and thumbnails etc? We live in a society that is driven by the week; it begins and ends with your weekend and weekdays are ΓÇÿgrindtime.ΓÇÖ You need to plan your YouTube content to follow a weekly schedule. I have a livestream I take part in every Monday afternoon, and I donΓÇÖt want the impressions from that livestream to mess up impressions that should have gone towards a regular video, so I will post a regular, core-content video every Tuesday. Then I promote it on all social media and fishing forums so that all those fishermen who are spending all week just waiting to get out on their boats have content to watch while they are playing on their computers/phones at work. I make sure to get in some good posts on social media every morning before work, I answer comments and have new content available every day before my first cup of coffee. Also, during peak season I try to film a secondary video for Fridays just to take advantage of the traffic, though this is often a 'filler' type video (a product review, how-to or shorts video).
I hold true to a very strict regime when it comes to ‘free time.’ Until it starts paying the bills YouTube is a discipline and as such it counts as my ‘free time.’ I made the conscious decision to give up TV and video games in favor of editing/publishing videos. Instead of listening to the radio when driving to work I listened to Nick Nimmin, Daniel Batal and Shelly Saves the Day videos. When I am off work I get to go fishing… a lot. I don’t get to go do the other things that I might enjoy doing as much, and I don’t get to go fishing without a camera in my face. I have to keep my family inspired and interested in fishing and filming instead of going out to the movies. Driving and inspiring my family is a constant, critical piece of the equation too… if I can not keep them interested then life becomes twice as difficult. Like any good staff I have to understand and respect their limitations, desires and mental health just as much as I need to understand, respect and utilize their gifts and individual skillset. And yes; my family has sit-down, quarterly meetings about YouTube.
Batch That Content!!!
This has been a saving grace. I try to have a plan of attack to film multiple videos at once. This can be heinous; but with a little planning it isnΓÇÖt too difficult to come up with 3-4 video ideas and to go film them all on the same day. Maybe after a day of fishing I film us making dinner with the family; this allows me to make two videos. I can also do a product testimonial/review video while fishing or do a whole video about my favorite types of hooks for offshore fishing. If you can get 5-6 videos filmed in a weekend you really free yourself up not only to put more effort into future videos but also to allow yourself some room for mental health.
Content Breakdown
Finally, something else that plays into your mental health is the type of content that you make. The foundation of my channel is our fishing vlog (what I keep calling my ‘core-content’). That is the backbone of our channel. I make family-oriented fishing videos based around Padre Island. But that isn’t all that I do. I also do product reviews, I make How-To Videos, 360-degree videos, Shorts and Livestreams. Tuesdays belong to the Vlog… everything centers around that. That accounts for about 60% of our videos. Since I can’t film two core vids per week I supplement our content by doing a second post every week… which consists of the other types of videos. This is the rough breakdown of our content:
60% Core-Content (The Vlog)
20% How-To Videos, Product Reviews Etc. This content is meant to help those who have questions about visiting Padre Island and fishing, things like that. ItΓÇÖs highly searchable and also helps me to establish authority as the premiere source of vacation fishing information for the area.
10% 360-Degree videos (which are just a short video for fun showing a school of fish underwater or something that people rarely get to see while fishing in 360 so you can look around), Product Reviews, Shorts (which I typically make as fodder for social media but I will occasionally post to YouTube if they have some value) and Affiliate-Specific videos meant to sell products.
10% Whatever the heck I want. I manage the channel like a business, I have given up my free time and I treat the channel like a full-time job. I am consistent and rigid. I also want to be the boss that I want to work for and as such I give myself 10% of my videos to do whatever I feel like doing. ItΓÇÖs my channel and if I canΓÇÖt have fun doing what IΓÇÖm doing then there is no point in any of this. So 10% of the videos on my channel can be whatever I want. I can be goofy. I can have fun. I can step away from fishing or from the vlog or whatever and I can focus on me. Treat yourself right and have a plan to accommodate not only your audience, your peers and the algorithm but yourself. You owe it to everyone to be at 100% when you are making your content.
That is a lot of math that is involved in simply making sure that there is someone present to work. Remember that time you were sitting in Algebra II and someone asked ‘when are we ever going to use this in real life?’ Well guess what… now is that time.
Because as much as this was a huge thorn in my side the past ten years it is also a skill that I never let go and in fact I use it quite often on my own YouTube channel. I’ll save you the absolute mess that is my life (especially this year) but believe me… my personal life is equally as horrific and cluttered and confusing as anybody else in this forum. The balancing act that is a 10-year home remodel, a wife who is literally crazy, a pandemic, a ten-year old daughter who collects hobbies, working these inflexible managerial jobs and living over an hour away from the place that my YouTube channel is based around makes it exceedingly difficult to manage a channel.
But I managed to do so for five years and nearly 300 videos now, and I am going to share with you the things that made this possible. It was rough; it was not easy and if you are looking for a magic solution you are in the wrong field. There is nothing easy about YouTube. You will need to learn to adapt your life to it. You will need to get help. And hopefully you were listening in that Algebra II class because that is going to come in handy.
Schedule a Break
Yup… my content schedule revolves around the times when I will not be posting. YouTube views historically drop off during the holidays, especially for amazingly-decent family fishing channels. So that’s a nice perk. I take off December/January every year because… well what’s the point? My audience needs a break, I need a break, the fishing sucks and nobody is watching YouTube anyway. Better to let the laundry air out and then start anew when things begin to make their way back in February and March. I’ll film a few videos specifically for my audience, but I make no requirements on myself to get that done.
I Make Seasonal Content
I break up my content by seasons. Every year is a new season of family fishing content. There is value in this because it allows me to have multiple playlists and it allows new viewers to go back and see our growth. It also allows us to celebrate things… instead of just constantly dumping content on YouTube we can now prepare and generate excitement for a whole new upcoming season. It gives us a chance to create a fervor over new content. In addition to this creating content on a seasonal basis allows us to tie videos together. Every winter we come up with a goal for the year, and every video needs to have some tie to that goal. This creates a story-arch that covers 20-25 videos and encourages viewers to watch them all; if you want to blow up on YouTube finding ways of getting viewers to watch multiple videos is one of the things you must master. This year I intend to double-down on this by including tie-ins like ‘this is what happened in our last video’ and ‘this is what is happening in the next video’ sections to further encourage viewers to keep watching.
Plan By The Week
The most important aspect of scheduling your content is how it fits in to your life. Where do you find the time to film, edit, do your metadata research and thumbnails etc? We live in a society that is driven by the week; it begins and ends with your weekend and weekdays are ΓÇÿgrindtime.ΓÇÖ You need to plan your YouTube content to follow a weekly schedule. I have a livestream I take part in every Monday afternoon, and I donΓÇÖt want the impressions from that livestream to mess up impressions that should have gone towards a regular video, so I will post a regular, core-content video every Tuesday. Then I promote it on all social media and fishing forums so that all those fishermen who are spending all week just waiting to get out on their boats have content to watch while they are playing on their computers/phones at work. I make sure to get in some good posts on social media every morning before work, I answer comments and have new content available every day before my first cup of coffee. Also, during peak season I try to film a secondary video for Fridays just to take advantage of the traffic, though this is often a 'filler' type video (a product review, how-to or shorts video).
I hold true to a very strict regime when it comes to ‘free time.’ Until it starts paying the bills YouTube is a discipline and as such it counts as my ‘free time.’ I made the conscious decision to give up TV and video games in favor of editing/publishing videos. Instead of listening to the radio when driving to work I listened to Nick Nimmin, Daniel Batal and Shelly Saves the Day videos. When I am off work I get to go fishing… a lot. I don’t get to go do the other things that I might enjoy doing as much, and I don’t get to go fishing without a camera in my face. I have to keep my family inspired and interested in fishing and filming instead of going out to the movies. Driving and inspiring my family is a constant, critical piece of the equation too… if I can not keep them interested then life becomes twice as difficult. Like any good staff I have to understand and respect their limitations, desires and mental health just as much as I need to understand, respect and utilize their gifts and individual skillset. And yes; my family has sit-down, quarterly meetings about YouTube.
Batch That Content!!!
This has been a saving grace. I try to have a plan of attack to film multiple videos at once. This can be heinous; but with a little planning it isnΓÇÖt too difficult to come up with 3-4 video ideas and to go film them all on the same day. Maybe after a day of fishing I film us making dinner with the family; this allows me to make two videos. I can also do a product testimonial/review video while fishing or do a whole video about my favorite types of hooks for offshore fishing. If you can get 5-6 videos filmed in a weekend you really free yourself up not only to put more effort into future videos but also to allow yourself some room for mental health.
Content Breakdown
Finally, something else that plays into your mental health is the type of content that you make. The foundation of my channel is our fishing vlog (what I keep calling my ‘core-content’). That is the backbone of our channel. I make family-oriented fishing videos based around Padre Island. But that isn’t all that I do. I also do product reviews, I make How-To Videos, 360-degree videos, Shorts and Livestreams. Tuesdays belong to the Vlog… everything centers around that. That accounts for about 60% of our videos. Since I can’t film two core vids per week I supplement our content by doing a second post every week… which consists of the other types of videos. This is the rough breakdown of our content:
60% Core-Content (The Vlog)
20% How-To Videos, Product Reviews Etc. This content is meant to help those who have questions about visiting Padre Island and fishing, things like that. ItΓÇÖs highly searchable and also helps me to establish authority as the premiere source of vacation fishing information for the area.
10% 360-Degree videos (which are just a short video for fun showing a school of fish underwater or something that people rarely get to see while fishing in 360 so you can look around), Product Reviews, Shorts (which I typically make as fodder for social media but I will occasionally post to YouTube if they have some value) and Affiliate-Specific videos meant to sell products.
10% Whatever the heck I want. I manage the channel like a business, I have given up my free time and I treat the channel like a full-time job. I am consistent and rigid. I also want to be the boss that I want to work for and as such I give myself 10% of my videos to do whatever I feel like doing. ItΓÇÖs my channel and if I canΓÇÖt have fun doing what IΓÇÖm doing then there is no point in any of this. So 10% of the videos on my channel can be whatever I want. I can be goofy. I can have fun. I can step away from fishing or from the vlog or whatever and I can focus on me. Treat yourself right and have a plan to accommodate not only your audience, your peers and the algorithm but yourself. You owe it to everyone to be at 100% when you are making your content.
