In the Before Times, I spent maybe 3-4 hours a week on Twitch, mostly watching my brother’s streams, or events like Games Done Quick and Evo. But since the pandemic hit, I spent every day on the website because everyone is streaming. I went from following maybe five channels total to a couple dozen amongst my friends and family alone. Several of these folks had previously never shown any interest in streaming, and are now on the grind for Affiliate. Even I’m streaming more often!
Not only that, but they all want to stream at the same time. Every weekday at 8 pm, I get Twitch notifications from the 2-4 people streaming at that very moment (assuming the notifcations arrive on time, because they frequently don’t). I hate to admit how many evenings I’ve spent with two stream windows and their respective chats pulled up on my screen.
The thing is, a lot of the personal projects that I want to do consist of things I can’t do (or can’t do effectively) while I’m watching Twitch. I can’t write while I’m listening to someone else talk. If I want to practice playing music, then I can’t hear the streamers. The only thing I can do while I’m watching a stream is play games. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since my game backlog is a mile long, but it’s cutting into my other hobbies. I only have so much time in the day to myself, and tuning into everyone’s streams means that my weekday evenings are shot.
The simple solution would be to watch fewer streams. Indeed, I tried to avoid watching people’s streams for a few weeks, but I didn’t make any more progress on my projects than I normally would. In fact, it weighed on me that I was spending less time interacting with people.
After that little experiment, I made more of an effort to not beat myself up over being “unproductive.” Being away from people for so long has been difficult for my mental health, and there’s no reason for me to push myself to complete these projects if I’m not feeling up to it.
What I need most right now is to connect with people, and tuning into streams lets me do that. I get to hang out with people I can’t see right now, make new friends from around the world, and have discussions about topics I’m passionate about. Too much of that can’t be a bad thing, right?