Given that I've been a bit short on time this week due to the Olive Harvest taking all day every day, I got to wondering what's best for me focus on when short on time....
Posting on Hive.....
Based on my last four posts, my token-rewards average around $35 a post, factoring in Hive and LEO rewards together. (Rewards are half the visible total minus around 5% to reflect the current trend on HBD floating just < $1).
A post takes me on average about an hour to research and write, so that's easy to calculate at $35 worth of token rewards an hour. These are pretty decent, reliable returns, which is why I aim to publish once every 20-22 hours, making sure there's just over one post a day over the course of a month.
Splinterlands Rentals...
With Splinterlands rentals my token-rewards are around 15000 DEC a day, or $150 a day, but this is with me tweaking the daily rentals to make sure they are competitive - lowering some of them as they come off to make sure they get re-rented promptly and reviewing daily to ensure I'm not renting too low, taking those off the rental-market and then re-renting.
This whole process takes me around 20 minutes a day - it takes a while to confirm everything in Key Chain, every single individual card!
However, given that I could probably earn $100 a day on card rentals just by setting them lower so that they would always rent out promptly, rather than manually tweaking to get the best price, I'm going to guestimate that my 20 minutes a day earns me an additional $50 a day of worth of token-rewards, so that's $150 an hour.
Analysis
Tweaking Splinterlands rentals is MUCH more lucrative than daily posting! Five times more lucrative, for me, in fact.
TBH I didn't expect the difference between the two to be so enormous, but there you go, sometimes a little bit of analysis yields surprising results!
NB those figures are mid-season averages, the EOS day it's hands-down full-on Splinterlands wins as the daily DEC rewards double for the day.
However, tweaking Splinterlands rentals is not in the slightest bit enjoyable, in fact it's a monotonous grind, BUT MUCH EASIER than working for a living (and about 50 times more lucrative than doing agricultural labour in East Central Portugal), so it's a no-brainer to keep doing this.
In comparison posting is more enjoyable because it's a creative process, but also more effort, and something I personally IDENTIFY with a lot more, and the daily post isn't something I want to quit doing.
Conclusions....
So what this tells me is that if I am short on time and it's a choice between tweaking the Splinterlands rentals and writing a post, I'll choose tweaking the rentals and publish my daily post slightly later, allowing myself to have maybe 30 hours between two posts occasionally rather than the 20-22 hour schedule I usually aim for!
NB the figures above are entirely hypothetical and your own relative token-rewards will depend on your own Hive-post rewards and your own rental returns, but I'd urge anyone to do this kind of time-earnings based analysis - the results can be VERY informative!