This morning one of the brand new minnows I invited to use the wantwiserupvote tag replied that he couldn't and referred me to his post explaining why.
In the process of trying to figure out where he was coming from I got inspired to write a long and thoughtful post of my own waxing eloquent about how Steemit users need to be intentional about reaching out to other Steemit users who aren't currently in their circles of social interaction and how a critical mass of people doing this might make a positive impact on the Steem distribution situation.
Writing that post made me think about how I sometimes will want to take more time to compose an especially thoughtful or involved post that goes beyond the quick how wiser voted today posts I typically throw up there.
But taking the time to compose that longer post is going to represent time I can't spend curating. After I've made that long post I might not have it in me to go and upvote 56 posts or comments, and I especially might not have the mental energy to go hunt down more small minnows via the introduceyourself tag. Especially if it's already been a long and exhausting week--remember this thing called "In Real Life?" Especially if after publishing said post I get into a long and involved back and forth with a reader.
I realized that I'm going to need a day when I can go lighter on the curating so I can compose something more meaningful instead. But I also don't want to lose any opportunity to influence with my votes. I still want to get in all 280 full strength votes in a week.
So I came up with a new voting plan which spreads out my heaviest voting over four days, and reserves the fifth day for less voting so I can focus on writing instead.
The rationale is that after taking Saturday and Sunday off, I will probably want some extra votes on Monday to catch up, and then I'll want to taper it off over the next three days. Then on Friday I basically reserve enough votes to upvote my own posts and whatever other content I want--no need to check authors to make sure they are still small minnows, just upvote what I like. I compose my post, upvote a few things, and then I'm done. Until Monday.
You can see from the picture above that I'm falling short of the 56 upvotes I'd planned to make today. I'm just too tired to do anymore. I need to get some sleep. I also need to focus on other things. And I need a couple days off. This post could also be titled How to keep Steemit a hobby and not a second (or third or fourth) job. These various voting plans and tweaks are my way of figuring out how to best accomplish that.
My SteemWhale rank is currently 3285, my reputation score is 55.6, and my voting strength is 79.53%. It will be back at 100% long before I resume upvoting sometime on Monday.