Trying to stay above water in the Beast? Here are some of my tips for survival...

On Whaleshares this is Day 8 of the CEC Challenge called 'The Beast', which means that there are still a few more days ahead of us. For this reason, I thought it would be useful to sum up my little tricks that keep me above the waterline.

^{Source of the C00 free image}

Yes, this is the 8th day and for me the third in a row when I start to work very early in the morning and come home extremely late after an exhausting and brain-washing day. One of these "long days" was planned so I admit that yesterday's post was done during the previous weekend in advance. Still, I need to post every day and make approximately 50 comments per day.

Here is how I did it so far...

I keep track of my activities. I have my own tracking excel sheet where I see my progress with the comments:

It is quite simple. It has my goal number of posts, post-count at the start, current post-count and the number of outstanding posts to be able to reach my goal.

In the next column I indicate how many posts I made (I kind of feel bad to include posts in the count when the challenge is for having 700 comments, so I try to make 700 comments WITHOUT the posts), and a daily breakdown of the number of comments made (I try to do 50 per day but I cannot achieve that every day, so I also try to calculate a cumulative figure to tell me how many are missing from these daily 50s). The number of comments on a given day is automatically calculated (I just enter the current post count and a formula deducts the starting post-count and the total of the previous days).

Following where I am in the process is quite important for me. It is a basic quality assurance policy that the earlier you detect any variance from the plan the better, so it is not enough to check your results at the end, you continuously have to check where you are during the process.

Some other tips

• When I am not leaving from home at an extremely early time I try to answer the replies received during the night. Making 50 comments a day is difficult for me in one row, so whenever it is possible I try to split it to one shift in the morning and one shift in the evening.
• In the evening when get home I try to follow the advice @merej99 was giving earlier and make the daily post first. She said (and I totally agree) that one can catch up with comments but it is not possible to fill in the gap of a missing daily post.
• After the post I answer the replies first and then scroll over the post promotion section of the Beast Discord to see what the others have written. I try to read and comment as many posts as possible. (These comments then generate some answers that I can start replying to in the morning... etc.)

Well, basically this is it. As you can see from the screenshot above, I haven't made any comments yet today. I have just arrived home and sat down to make the post (luckily on these long days I have to drive a lot and during this, I always have time to figure out what to write about... 😊) I still have a backlog from the previous days but I am positive that I can catch up during the weekend. 😎

So what is your tactic? How are you doing in the Challenge?

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This post was cross-posted on Whaleshares.