How I Stick to a Content Schedule
I mentioned in my last post that I have a 2-hour commute to and from work, four days per week. On top of a seven-hour in-office work day, I usually wait 30 minutes for the boat. These factors make each day in the office a 12-hour excursion. And that’s if the ferries are running on time. On average, I leave my home at 5:40 AM and get home at 6:20 PM.
When I got this job two years ago, long before my autism diagnosis, I immediately realized I would need a laptop to make the most of my travel time. I needed to find a way to extract value from my 2-hour commute. I got a laptop with the goal of editing videos, starting a game developer journey, and writing a book. Lofty goals, to be sure, and almost immediately fell behind the schedule I had intended for myself.
And it’s because, ultimately, although I called it a schedule, it wasn’t. It was get on the boat, find a desk, and then figure out what I was going to do. But some days, for whatever reason, I couldn’t get a desk. Or I would sit down and feel unmotivated to do anything. On these days, I spent most of the boat ride doomscrolling on TikTok or just browsing Reddit, watching other people’s successes while I sat there, stewing in frustration.
I did manage to start and finish Disco Elysium on these commutes, but I didn’t feel particularly good about that achievement. It always felt like I could play games at home—this was an opportunity I was missing out on and I just couldn’t channel my creative energy effectively.
When I got diagnosed in January 2024, I could feel things starting to shift. My understanding of the world around me changed, and I began implementing reasonable accommodations in both my home and workplace. Creating boundaries like not going to grocery stores helped elevate my mental health, and gave me an opportunity to revisit my schedule. I needed something that was immune to burnout disruption, as work was leading me down a path of crippling autistic burnout, and I landed on web design as the first piece of the puzzle.
I wanted to build a site for Ozject Media. I’d done one for Babben Media & Entertainment before, and PlayStation Compass before that—but Ozject Media was supposed to be different. It was supposed to be centred around me, rather than around an idea. I needed a clean, modular site that allowed me to make changes easily, supported blog posts, and the more baked-in features the better.
I started where most people start: Wordpress. Now, I despise Wordpress. Even their new modular designer is still a part of that whole ecosystem. In theory, the flexibility of the thousands of plugins should make someone happy—there’s tons of stuff to micromanage and so much customization. But that’s also the problem—it’s too much. And every plugin wants you to pay for its premium features. Every time I logged into my Wordpress site, I was bombarded with “GO PREMIUM” reminders for every plugin. I couldn’t even get to a point where I was writing a blog post because of the overwhelming amount of ads and individual customization options within each plugin.
I had used Squarespace before, while I was doing my MBA, and came back to reexplore it. I must have started 3 or 4 trials in the first three months, each time getting stuck at the high cost of entry. I would try to go back to Wordpress or Namecheap’s Website Builder—a decent modular builder built into Namecheap’s basic hosting plans. I might have stuck with Namecheap too, except that blog posts aren’t put on their own page—instead, they stay within the blog container you build into the site. I realize a lot of this is nitpicking, but if I have to struggle to do the thing I want to do, the service isn’t right for me. I’m okay with learning, but the answers need to be accessible, and Website Builder’s generic name made it impossible for me to find answers to help me overcome my challenges.
Website Builder is fine, but lacks some specific features I wanted, like outlined text for putting over images—I had to use drop shadows, which aren't as nice.
I’m quite a ways into this post and still haven’t talked about the title: how I stick to a content schedule.
The first point, which I’ve sort of included in the word vomit above, is any schedule needs to begin in things you enjoy. If you have to force yourself to do it, one bad day could lead to a lapse. And in my experience, lapses lead to failure. I started my schedule with web design, something I have enjoyed for over 25 years, ever since my father brought home a Pentium 200 in 1997. Teenage me opened Notepad and started practicing writing my own HTML and I’ve been hooked ever since. I knew that designing a site that was perfect for me would be the first “easy” success in a schedule, and then when the site was done, I would reallocate those design hours into blog writing hours. I chose my undergraduate carefully back in 2011—I knew I liked writing, and I knew I could be successful in pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. Admittedly not the best degree for finding meaningful work, but I’ll never regret studying something I loved.
So my boat time is locked in now.. two days per week I write, and two days per week are flex days—where I can work or not, and not feel guilty if I just watch a movie the whole time. That leaves the home piece to still sort out.
I have Sunday and Monday off each week, and I work from home on Wednesdays. There are three other avenues I’d like to add to my content platform: YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok. But where to start? Again, it needs to be achievable, enjoyable, and something I can properly focus on. I landed on Twitch, as it requires very little preparation and little to no post-stream work. You press Start Streaming, you do your thing for a few hours, then you sign off and move to the bedtime tasks of making sure the kids brush their teeth. Twitch alone does not have the best discoverability, so I have to recognize that my time on Twitch now is primarily about sticking to a schedule, not growing a community at a rapid pace.
I’m stopping there for now—blog posts and Twitch, and once I’ve been able to sustain those two for a period of, say, a month, I’ll know I can add in a new element. That’s not to say i’ll never post a TikTok in that time—only that I’m not holding myself to a schedule for TikTok yet. Once I know I can fit the time in alongside everything else, I’ll add it to the weekly schedule and hold myself to it.
For your content schedule, I would suggest first determining how much time you have in a week to work on content. Be realistic. If you work 8 hours per day, with a 1-hour commute each direction, you have ~6 hours (assuming 8 hours sleep) of time for everything else in your day. Eating, social obligations, children, spouse.. these things all take time out of your 6-hour chunk. Think of your time as currency, and each time you have to do something that takes time, you’re drawing from that currency bank. You’ll see just how fast it depletes, leaving you with a fraction of that time to actually spend on yourself. Measure it for two weeks. Measure how much time you actually get to sit down and do what you want to do—but if that’s going to the gym or playing video games, is that something you’re willing to reduce to pursue your content creation goals? If not (and my guess is not—because it’s not for me), that time cannot be cannibalized to get you where you want to be.
I started meal prepping for the next week’s meals, so I don’t need to come home from work and spend time cooking. I spend a significant amount of time on Sunday or Monday doing meal prep for the week, but that frees up 20 to 60 minutes per day that I don’t spend cooking anymore. I am on the boat right now, with two bacon, egg & cheese wraps in my bag to eat at work.
Once you have figured out where and when to carve out time, what can you achieve in that much time? Is it sustainable if you’re burnt out? What is the likelihood that you’ll need to cancel that time for any reason? List out all the risks you can identify. Go back three months, counting how many times your hobby time was interrupted by something. How are you going to protect your time? Turn off your phone? Close your door? Communicate with your family that you’re going into “focus mode” and they shouldn’t interrupt you? I used that one when my kids were home from summer vacation, but I wanted to protect my work-from-home days.
