Disaster December 2019: What Happened, What We Learned

*Sipp*

The Upshots!

Turns out shit hits the fan if you stretch yourself too thin! We didn’t take the implications of potential sickness into account when planning out December, which spiralled into us being woefully understaffed. What have we learned?

Personally, I’m more conscious of burnout than ever. This December was probably the most exhausting yet (a few personal life things also reared their head, how fun!). I’ll be keeping a far more rigid 9-5, and I’ll focus on protecting my writing time. Ultimately, I earn my keep by writing & recording content: I need to be less distracted. 

How are we going to do that?

- We’ve reworked out file system for FAR greater ‘findability’

- Matt is now fully trained on the YouTube publishing process

- I have reworked my Thumbnail templates to enhance creation speed

- I have revised part of the scriptwriting process to batch video Title & Metadata creation

- With Nikki (our latest editor) up to speed, Matt is now free to work in a hybrid producer/news channel content role. This’ll cut down on lots of the small tasks that I have to do, and will allow me to be more focused on content.

- Alcohol. Coffee. Monster Energy. I’m having far less of all. My diet went to shit, and man, in terms of energy levels & mental ability, I really felt it.

On the Patreon Master Tier reward front, well we just royally fucked up the timing. Turns out 300 items is a lot, especially with our packaging process (double envelopes, bubble wrap, hand signing names). Everything was shipped on the 12th of December. That’s far past out goal of the 6th of the month (for context, Patreon only gives us the list of the last month’s Patronage on the 4th of the following month). How are we fixing this? Well, that’s where my mom comes in. She recently retired, and said she’d enjoy the monthly trip to Belfast! So, she’s going to handle Patreon postage! So, for you, postage will be faster. For me, well it’ll be a big stress reduction, I’ll get to hang out with my mum more, and I’ll be able to pay her for the work! 

The Story

Well, things likely couldn’t have gone worse for us than they did this December! I’ve since taken about 2 weeks away from the day to day runnings of things in order to get a better handle on everything. So, what happened?

The entire office, save 2 people, was hit with a potent flu. This… this was a problem, mainly because it coincided with Patreon shipping for the Demon Hunter & Pin month. That meant that all 300 had to be done by Mat & Myself - a process that ended up taking us the best part of 3 whole days - including a 5am finish on UK election night. At least we got to watch Andrew Neil savage politicians for a bit!

This very much wasn’t ideal, leading to Patreon shipping being late, Matt not being able to edit of research content for a few days & me not being able to write or record. The knock-on effects from this were kinda hardcore, especially since Conall was on leave (getting married!). This combo of Patreon falling to us & the flu spreading through the office lead to the cancellation of half our planned December content, hitting the news channel especially hard. Conall was also off on a planned break (he is now married!!), which would have been fine, if not for my lack of foresight. Past that, I had several reasonably dramatic personal life moments - all capped off with a frantic end of year social schedule.

Oh, part of the office roof almost caved in. …that one didn’t slow us down, but it was rather comical!

To close - shit happens, and you learn from it. I’m glad the problems of this December happened when they did. They focused me on stepping back and thinking about things - something that’s easily missed when caught up in the day to day flow. We'll be taking a far more reasonable approach in 2020: one that you can learn more about here!

Overall, if you've had a rough spot with work, then I hope at least some of this was useful to you! I think we’ve got a brilliant plan for 2020, and I’ll share more very soon.